I can help with formatting.

Step 1: Boot using your boot Floppy
Step 2: Type in the command format c: on the directory A:\>
Step 3: this will pop up: WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST! type in "Y" and Press enter.
Step 4: Let it format, type in the new volume and there, a perfectly formatted HDD.

 

Thanks I'll do that, but after I get the modem's driver =\
I'm wondering how much time a reformat lasts?

 

How much time it takes?

 

lol yeah

 

Not long at all. trust me.

 

Next time makes partition in you don't wanna lose all your datas again

 

Good idea. Anyway the Good thing is he told me He's putting all his data onto a backup CD.

 

Yeah, better than nothing, but partitionning next time will save him the horrible time spent to burn/copy-paste everything

 

Indeed.

 

format c: /q /u

/q is quick /u is unconditional

besides i'd do partition neway 1 for windows + progs , 1 for ur other files / games or whatever else u might want on it

 

YEah but Quick format skips some stuff, and I dont know what unconditional does :O

EDIT:
@Miretank: I found Modem Drivers. I'll PM you the details.

 

@GCFreak: whoa! I found them too! later may we talk? i'm a hurry now
thanks everyone, but now goes a bit more questions:

-do i need the microsoft office? r there progs that are like Word, Excel, etc? which progs do you recommend?
-Do I need anymore drivers?

THANKS A LOT,
Bye!

 

Well, in the case of microsoft office, I recommend the OpenOffice. It open source and free anyways(don't want to get involved with piracy later on).^^

 

Unless you have really ancient parts, all the drivers can be easily found online.

 

this is on formatting HDs:

where i work, we use a program called Boot N Nuke. google it, its freeware. when you boot your pc with it, follow all onscreen directions, and it will basically wipe every last bit of data. this ensures that no "leftovers" of a previous OS remain on your HD somewhere; believe me, ive had this happen before, usually as a result of bad sectors. usually a 1 or 3-pass wipe works fine.

also, if you have a hard drive that has bad sectors on it, this program will fix those errors, but you have to lose all your data of course

 

where i work, we use a program called Boot N Nuke. google it, its freeware. when you boot your pc with it, follow all onscreen directions, and it will basically wipe every last bit of data. this ensures that no "leftovers" of a previous OS remain on your HD somewhere; believe me, ive had this happen before, usually as a result of bad sectors. usually a 1 or 3-pass wipe works fine.


Sorta like the macintosh disc utility . 1-pass (quick format) 3-pass(destroy all os info) 16-pass (most data unrecoverable) and 36 pass (goverment files)

 

Just a tip: have a 3GB partition for Windows and clean it with a program called DustbusterXP after you installed everything

 

heh, and I am alive =D
Thanks everybody for help.
BUT I fear I've made a mistake. I formated by booting the PC with WinXP disc (since my floppy disc is giving errors and the blank cd I had was used in the backup), formated fastly (10-15 min i think, I was imagining about 3hrs! ) and reinstalled the Windows.
However I've seen that my HDD is now in NTFS. Nothing against it, I'd experience with NTFS before, its good, but for games is terrible. I still haven't installed a game to test (just installed de drivers and Firefox - or course ), but I'm wondering what was mistake while formatting.
Btw, its very cool to format! :evil: now I'm sure I'll format my PC more times! :evil:
The suggested Boot N Nuke I'll use when I get a blank cd, then I'll burn it in and reformat the Hard disk again (don't know why, but I'm not sure if my HD is clean enough =\)
Very noob question: How do I partition the HDD? :emb:
Thanks for the help

 

>> Just a tip: have a 3GB partition for Windows and clean it with a program called DustbusterXP after you installed everything

I recommend 5gb personally, esp if you have plenty of devices and SP2

 

Miretank: That's the normal method for formatting and partitioning drives if you're using Windows 2000/XP. There's nothing wrong with NTFS and games, I've installed plenty of games on NTFS-formatted drives and never had a problem. There's numerous security benefits of using NTFS over FAT32 and NTFS also allows files over 4 GB to be in one piece. The only thing I don't like about NTFS is that it reserves 12.5% of the drive's space for the MFT, which is very stupid if you're not running a file/web server; not to mention it always likes to stick the reserved space near the beginning of the drive, where speeds are higher.

 

aham, NTFS has a lot good things. I heard about the issue with games and I say about this cause I had Half Life 2 in a FAT32 HDD and other in a NTFS. NTFS' had a very slow load, I'd to wait 5~10 minutes to enter the game. With FAT32 I was playing in 2mins.
Anyway I like NTFS cause you have files over 4GB

 

Sorta like the macintosh disc utility . 1-pass (quick format) 3-pass(destroy all os info) 16-pass (most data unrecoverable) and 36 pass (goverment files)

yeah basically. only this program uses a linux kernel. dont worry, this doesnt install anything to do with linux, the program just boots from a floppy to run the format.

 

aham, NTFS has a lot good things. I heard about the issue with games and I say about this cause I had Half Life 2 in a FAT32 HDD and other in a NTFS. NTFS' had a very slow load, I'd to wait 5~10 minutes to enter the game. With FAT32 I was playing in 2mins.
Anyway I like NTFS cause you have files over 4GB

The speed differences between the two formats is pretty small. I haven't tried comparing FAT32 and NTFS directly on my computers, but NTFS is pretty fast on both my Athlon XP and Athlon 64 machines. I know this may sound a little n00bish but do you regularly defragment? If you want stuff to load really fast and you have some money to blow, get a Western Digital Raptor . I have one and it's pretty damn quick. Either that or some cheap 80 GB drives in RAID 0.

 

"aham, NTFS has a lot good things. I heard about the issue with games and I say about this cause I had Half Life 2 in a FAT32 HDD and other in a NTFS. NTFS' had a very slow load, I'd to wait 5~10 minutes to enter the game. With FAT32 I was playing in 2mins."

Changing the NTFS cluster size can help improving performance (less blank, less physical distance between datas) and lowers wasted space (less blanks, so more data). Partition Magic can do it, probably other softs can too

 

That works well for typical partitions but if you have something like an ISO partition, a cluster size of 64 KB actually helps out more. It reduces the amount of cluster beginning/end data, which gives you more space for big files. Other than that though, smaller clusters are more efficient. I wouldn't be surprised if there's people that have partitions for each kind of data they have, all with different cluster sizes .