You can't format network shares. And yes, Windows 98 only supports
FAT32 filesystems.

The XP installation CD will indeed format your drive. When it scans
for previous operation systems and finds your current install, tell it
to bug off and not repair/upgrade what it finds. There will be a
screen where it displays the partitions on your hard drive. I know if
you erase your NTFS partition and then tell XP to install on the now
blank drive it will format and install a fresh system.

I'm not sure you have to delete the partition, but if you're
determined to do things fresh, it won't hurt anything. If you go ahead
and install on the current partition, it may ask if you want to format
it. I'm not sure.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:08 AM, Jinx <joecolquitt@clear.net.nz> wrote:
> Types quick before there's another crash
>
> This PC, which I mentioned the other day needs a clean out, really
> needs it now. Some applications have totally lost the plot, I'll have
> to re-format the drive. Another worrying thing I've noticed is that
> something has been eating or de-allocating drive space at the rate of
> many MB per hour and slowing folder and www page opening to an
> absolute crawl. Incredibly and frustratingly slow for a 2.4GHz PC.
> Task Manager shows nothing using significant CPU time. A couple
> of weeks ago I had 10GB free, and this morning, in the time it took
> to copy files to an external drive, reported capacity went from 390MB
> (down from 1GB before I went to bed) to 325MB. I've looked before
> over the past few days but can't find any huge file. But free space
> has got so low now that I have to do something about it
>
> I've re-installed XP Pro over what was there and that's seemingly
> stopped the rot, but it's a Band-Aid and the machine randomly turns
> off, usually at the most inconvenient time. Already I've tried to look
> this problem up on the web but it's possibly IE causing the problem,
> so I have to ask yous guys as OE seems stable. Also I've not put
> many drivers back in, so that could be another cause
>
> I want to start with a clean drive. Previously I've always had 2 drives
> and can format one with the other. Two drives not possible at the
> moment. What I have got is this C: drive mapped to a Win98 machine
> and the XP Pro installation CD
>
> Now, if I could format with the 98 machine, that's going to be FAT32
> isn't it ? And NTFS preferred for XP ? The Win98 PC can see this drive
> on the LAN, but there's no option I've found to format it, even if I wanted
> to. I'm guessing XP just won't format the drive it's on, I've tried. Looked
> over the XP CD but haven't yet found how to get it to re-format the drive
> before installation. The only options I'm given are install or not
>
> HELP !!!
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