Hard Drive

Is it true once a hard drive has been formatted with XP it cannot be used in Windows S.E.?

Thanks

No it can be reformatted to work with win 98

Most drive Mfg's have a tool that let's you return the drive to state in was in when it was new.

Partition Magic 8.0 will allow you to convert NTFS to Fat32.

But as eddds40 brought out you can overwite with the tool in the manufactor's diagnostic program or use something like DBAN to zero write the drive. It will bury everything except actual physical disk damage.

Thanks for the replies. I'm assuming I need to have a computer with Window S.E. to do this. Or can I format the hard drive with FAT32 with M.E. or XP. Right now there is no operating system on the computer an attempts to load S.E. was not successful.

Software already mentioned by Train and eddds40 is OS independent.

The computer only needs to be able to boot from a bootable disk (floppy, CD, etc) that also has the tools on it that can partition and format a hard drive.

For example, if your computer has a working floppy drive, you could simply boot from a Windows 98 SE diskette and use the FDISK and FORMAT utilities that are also included on the same diskette.

Utilities to create various versions of bootdisks can be downloaded (for free) from http://www.bootdisk.com

This is not my computer so when I go back I will try the suggestions and report back.

Thanks!!

What we did is use a hard drive that we knew was formatted with FAT32 and we loaded Windows S.E. Then we hooked up each drive one at a time as a slave drive to the one with S.E. then formatted each one. One of them formatted with no problems and the other one we needed to do scan disk then format it. All is functioning well thanks to all of your help! You might be wondering why he wants to run S.E. He has some programs that do not have drivers for M.E., XP or Vista. Thanks again!

Thanks for posting your fix.

That program problem is well understood.