[admccull]

We have in our office a DELL Inspiron 5000 laptop that we want to "recycle" and send to an off-site location. Before we send it though we would like to clean it up and basically begin with a clean slate. A friend told me that in order to do that the hard drive needs to be formatted or re-formatted. Is that correct? And are there any "tricks of the trade" that I should look into before getting started? Does anyone know a link or a website that would provide instructions/guidence in formatting a hard drive? The laptop has is running Windows 2000 and 2000 Office Professional. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Drifters]

Do you still want to have an operating system on it or not? If not, I would get a boot disk (Win98) and from the command prompt type in fdisk and follow the steps. It's pretty simple.

 

[admccull]

Yes, we want to keep the same operating system Win 2000, and all of the software loaded on the laptop... or atleast Office 2000 Pro.

 

[Drifters]

Then I would do a clean install of Win2000 and MicroSoft Office.

You could fdisk the drive with the boot disk or if you have a Win2000 CD, you could format it from there.