[Am-info] Uninstalling Win XP

[Erick Andrews]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 17:05:22 -0700 (PDT), Bill Forrest wrote:

>Hi Everyone,
>
>This is a little off topic but I have a simple (I think) question: I'm
>going to buy a new laptop this week but I don't want to run XP on it.
>Can anyone tell me how to reformat the hard drive to load Win98?  Also
>will this cause a configuration problem for the hardware.  I'm going to
>buy an AlienWare Area 51m.  Thanks in advance for your input.
>
>Bill Forrest

The later incarnations of Microsoft operating systems are known
to change the master boot record (MBR) with entries that are
unique, and sometimes troublesome for other OS installations.

I don't know what "AlienWare Area 51m" is.  Is it an operating
system?  I've not heard of it.

However, most popular OS's will, when you go to install them,
offer a facility to reformat the drive.  Do it.  If it's not there with
yours, or won't work correctly, a safe bet is to drag out your old 
DOS (PCDOS is nice...or MSDOS) version-whatever diskettes,
start that DOS install, use FDISK to wipe the partition (maybe 
use FDISK /MBR), reformat with FAT, then start your new OS 
install.  That should dumb down the MBR and allow you to
install with a different installable file system (IFS).

-- 
Erick Andrews