Hiren's boot cd is what I use. It has several dos based utilities. Super fdisk is the one that I use to format HDDs. It just takes a few seconds and windows 98 has no problems with it.

Why not just format using the /Q parameter?

WTF THERE'S A /Q PARAMETER
uuuuuurrrrrghh. How did I not know about that... -_-

I think I'll check out Hiren's Boot CD even if that's plenty fast for my needs in the end though, 🤣.
As many niche projects as I tend to undertake, there's bound to be something helpful for me in there.

Thanks for the input.

Licentious Howler wrote:

WTF THERE'S A /Q PARAMETER uuuuuurrrrrghh. How did I not know about that... -_- […]
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WTF THERE'S A /Q PARAMETER
uuuuuurrrrrghh. How did I not know about that... -_-

I think I'll check out Hiren's Boot CD even if that's plenty fast for my needs in the end though, 🤣.
As many niche projects as I tend to undertake, there's bound to be something helpful for me in there.

Thanks for the input.

Also... why do you need to run fdisk every time?

Well, I certainly may have been doing something wrong, but from what I have tried, my Windows 98SE disc (that I inherited from my father's box of PC stuff) doesn't have utilities to manage partitions on it--it just points you to fdisk to wipe the partitions and make fresh ones, which doesn't take long.

But fdisk (or at least the version that is on his old boot floppy and the CD) isn't capable of formatting things from what I've gathered (but that /Q command seems to suggest otherwise), so then it's up to the 98SE installer to do that... which takes ages.

Maybe I should try burning a different one, I dunno'. Maybe I'm just bad at computas.

Wasn't there a newer version of FDISK on the Microsoft pages available for download ?
I *vaguely* remember something about LBA48, 120GB partition limits, etc.
Also Windows XP had an artifical 32GB limit for FAT32 (creation only, it supported larger existing partitions),
whereas FreeDOS could handle FAT32 up to 2TB.

Edit: It was the 137GB barrier, I believe.
Edit: Never mind. Just re-read the thread carefully.
The /Q parameter clears/overwrites the FAT. It's no complete formatting in the normal sense:
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/format.htm

You use fdisk to manage partitions
You use format to format them. You can use the /Q switch to skip performing a full format.

If you're afraid of messing up 9x you can either copy the windows folder to another folder and/or make a backup image.

Fdisk, no matter the verison is not able to format the drive. Fdisk is only used for deleting and making partitions, setting them active/inactive, etc.

See here for format.com
https://www.computerhope.com/formathl.htm

And you can always just use a boot floppy which will give you the ability to format without having to boot the install CD.

Alternatively, you could do what I ended up doing for my tester system:
Re: Multiple Windows 98SE installations on one drive?

Here's the specific post where I describe my method:
Re: Multiple Windows 98SE installations on one drive?

Basically, all I have to do is make multiple copies of the Windows directory (do this the first time in Windows from a different computer to preserve long filenames), name them all different things. The computer boots to the command prompt so I can rename (with the "move" command) the current Windows directory to whatever, then "rename" a different one as Windows. It only takes a second, and then when I type "win" it will run that particular Windows installation. You can also do this with the Program Files folder, but its probably easier to just delete the Creative folder each time.

The benefit of this is that I only had to set up my tester system ONCE with dozens of game demos and a few key drivers and applications, then each time I run a fresh Windows directory its basically just as it was originally.

The only other thing you might need to mess with is the autoexec.bat if the devices install DOS drivers. My solution to this was to REM out the commands each time with a note of what they're for. Like "REM CT4870" or "REM Vortex2". To swap to a different or fresh Windows install, I just rename the current Windows directory, rename one of the other copies to Windows, adjust the remarks in autoexec.bat, reboot the system(not necessary if you don't have to edit autoexec) and type win.

Obviously individual game configurations will need to be adjusted each time, but with as much hard drive space as you've got you could simply make a copy (a blank slate) of any games that are picky about hardware changes, and just overwrite it each time.

This method works great, I just recommend starting with very basic and compatible hardware, or hardware that absolutely isn't going to change. My tester is a Wintac 440BX board and an S3 Trio64v with no other devices attached, so the fresh Windows directory will work with nearly everything. I even used it for testing completely different boards and had no problems using this method.

Ah, now I see why I never used format.com--it's all coming back to me...
it's pure command-line goodness and I was too dumb to figure it out 🤣.
Pretty sure there wasn't anything about it in the documentation for this PC and my usual "just type 'help'" didn't do anything that time.

At least now I have the internet to tell me all of its commands and syntax.

@Ozzuneoj wow, that sounds like a perfect fit for this project! I'll probably just need to take an afternoon to figure it out though, heh.

Licentious Howler wrote:

I have an old Pentium III machine with a ~128 GB IDE HDD (7,200 RPM). Up until now, I had been using fdisk+Windows 98SE installe […]
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I have an old Pentium III machine with a ~128 GB IDE HDD (7,200 RPM).
Up until now, I had been using fdisk+Windows 98SE installer to format a FAT32 partition which has worked fine and will continue to do so even thought the actual formatting process is quite long (just under 1 hour)...

But I'm doing a project that involves installing a lot of old non-reference drivers from a specific card vendor (Creative) with what seem to be at least a few really terrible drivers that don't always uninstall cleanly and often make it really hard to install other sets of drivers. No Detonator Destroyer to rescue me here either. I suspect I'm going to need to reformat a lot, and I'm not looking forward to all the waiting around that will entail.

So does anybody have some cheeky tricks to speed up this process? I could even accept getting an IDE>SATA converter and doing some stuff on my modern PC if it comes to that because I'm sure it'll save time in the long run.

I already tried 'quick' formatting a FAT32 partition from a Linux distro once in the past (LegacyOS), but Windows 98's installer didn't like it at all and refused to install, so I still kept using the old fdisk method.

(sorry if this is kinda' noobish--I didn't really see any info on a quick search of the forums for topics like this.)

What I use for preparing a HDD larger than about 40GB in size with Windows 98 up to Windows XP If I am in a hurry is Nortons Partition Magic on 2 floppy disks. Done in just a couple of minutes.