There are other comparable pages online such as http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q106/4/19.asp, http://www.windrivers.com/tech/troubleshoot/removedm/removedm.htm and http://www.firmware.com/support/bios/hdclear.htm but the Dell one has always worked best for me.

Lets make sure this part is perfectly clear so there is no confusion: If you use this script then you are assuming all liability for its failure or success. I'm offering this to people who need a last resort to clean their drive. I have been told by an ex-tech that there is a slight failure rate which renders an already screwed up hard drive into a pretty paperweight. It has always sounded like a good trade off to me, but you have to decide for yourself because neither Myself or Dell are responsible for what you do with this.

This script wipes DISK 0. The problem is, if you have more than one physical drive it can be hard to determine which one is going to get whacked. I suggest you remove all hard drives except the one to be cleaned before trying this. Trust me on this one--I have been playing with drives for years and I still get fooled once in a while. Just recently I came across a computer that was silently booting DISK 1 as C: and making DISK 0 into D: because the first disk wasn't properly bootable. Had I just assumed that the booting drive was 0 then I would have wiped the wrong one.


Boot to Win98SE startup disk (It is the best OS made boot disk ever). Type in debug at the A: prompt.

Enter in the following commands:

Blue: what you type in.

Pink: what is displayed on the screen. (DO NOT TYPE THIS IN!)

Black: this is useful information. (DO NOT TYPE THIS IN!)

=====================================================================

To delete partitions on a hard drive:

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-F 220 L1000 0 (ENTER)

-A CS: 100 (ENTER)

xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 (ENTER)

xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 (ENTER)

xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 (ENTER)

xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 (ENTER) <---"80" for hd1, "81" for hd2 >

xxxx:010C INT 13 (ENTER)

xxxx:010E INT 20 (ENTER)

xxxx:0110 (ENTER) <-------BLANK LINE "VERY IMPORTANT" >

-G (ENTER)

Program terminated normally

- (CTRL)-(ALT)-(DEL) to reboot system

-------------------------------------------

Now you have to f-disk and format and reinstall the operating system. This Microsoft Tech Document on How to Install Windows 98 on a Computer with No Operating System might help.