[windowschick]

ok here goes . i have a pentium 4 ,128 megs of ram a 20 gig hd and a 1.3 gig processor (i think) i let a supposed friend "borrow" my computer and it seems he installed windows xp pro (not a "legal" version) i don't have a disk to reinstall windows me( which i was not fond of anyway) and my puter is not a commercial brand. i want to go linux(mandrake 9.0?)i have tried to download it but this whole ISO thing has me stumped. but i am so familiar with windows i dont know if i can handle it and i am worried that it won't have all the stuff i can get with windows. but first , i want to write zeros to the drive and reformat. but i can't ! I have tried everything and I can't boot to DOS i am stuck!!!?%$^$%&&
he also converted my hd to NTFS so i am bumming and i hate it and i desperately need help!hope y'all are feeling generous especially since i am new. i will be waiting anxiously for some good news if there is any.

[GOTzMADsKILLz]

Here's a tool that will help format your Hardrive it's called part and you will need a floppy disk.

DELPART

You Downlaod this and extract the files to a floppy. Then reboot your computer. Provided your first boot device is your Floppy drive it will delete everything on your Hardrive by wiping out the partition info, essentially creating a "clean" HDD. Then you can use Windows 98 etc, Linux or whatever you want. If you wish to use windows again you will need to Fdisk the HDD and create a primary partition on your Hardrive then just format using Fat32 and away you go.

[GOTzMADsKILLz]

Here's a tool that will help format your Hardrive it's called part and you will need a floppy disk.

DELPART

You Downlaod this and extract the files to a floppy. Then reboot your computer. Provided your first boot device is your Floppy drive it will delete everything on your Hardrive by wiping out the partition info, essentially creating a "clean" HDD. Then you can use Windows 98 etc, Linux or whatever you want. If you wish to use windows again you will need to Fdisk the HDD and create a primary partition on your Hardrive then just format using Fat32 and away you go.

[GOTzMADsKILLz]

strange...I seem to have posted twice by accident lol oh well...

[Casey820]

If you don't know anything about Linux, you're in for quite a large project. If you think you can just install Linux and you're up and running in a few hours, you're greatly mistaken. I hope you have another functioning Windows system to use while you learn Linux. You can't use ANY Windows software on it. You don't install software on it the same way you install it on Linux. The interface has some similarities, but it's not the same. To be blunt, if you can't figure out how to format your hard drive, you'll have a steep learning curve with Linux. I'm not saying you can't learn, but you won't have a functioning system for several days or weeks until you learn quite a bit about it.

[Dr Dave]

I detect alot of mistakes that are happening.
[1] Forget about ME Win XP Pro is by far the best OS
that Microsoft has come up with.
[2] Change XP to the "Classic View".
[3] You don't need to download SP1 as its messed up alot of computers. Download this program it will fix up your problem.
http://grc.com/xpdite/xpdite.htm
[4] Linux is extremely hard to properly install and run.
[5] I build computers and they all are intalled with XP.
[6] If you have any problems let us know.

[Dr Dave]

Heres one more item I'd like to add.
http://is-it-true.org/nt/utips/utips154.shtml

[lynch]

I guess I was the one who voted for "Depends on the version of Linux"
Mandrake is by far the most newbie-friendly of popular distributions.All the other replies(so far) seem to favor windows,but,as I try not to defend or attack operating systems,so I'll leave it at that.
I have always used the free utilities provided by the hard drive manufacturer to do low-level formatting and disk integrity checks,and they all seem to work pretty well. Just go to the hdd manufacturer's web site and download thier drive utilities.HTH
lynch

[lynch]

Edit:double post.There seems to be a lot of this happening this morning
lynch

[amm2001bg]

Hell of a morning, Lynch! It's midnight here .
I am happy now with my boxes running RH 7.2 and Slackware 8.0. Don't know about Mandrake but RedHat is really "user friendly"...for now.

[mixx941]

Hello. I just thought I'd add my two cents. Yesterday I got the idea that I wanted to put Linux on my Windows 2000 machine as a dual boot. I wanted to get a feel for Linux just to see how cool it really was. I downloaded Mandrake Linux 9.0, because I had also heard that Mandrake is the most newbie-friendly. It was pretty easy to install and configure. The hard part I think is installing applications. I haven't successfully installed one yet.

I think the interface is cool and it runs a little faster than Windows 2000 on a 500MHz computer. But as I said the programs issue is kind of a drag.

There's my input.

Hope it helped!

-Mark

[lynch]

Put the cd with the app you want to install in the drive,click the cd icon on the desktop and navigate through the RPMs to find the one you want to install.R-click the RPM and choose package installer.If you need to install somthing else,it will tell you.
lynch