USB Hard Drive

[shane25119]

Hello all,
My friend recently got the nessasary hardware to convert a regular IDE hard drive into a portable one (some special casing) and has asked me to format an old hard drive to use in this casing as his portable hard drive. I am formatting it now using the Windows 98 install disc, and am wondering how far I need to go with this for it to work as essentially a giant USB flash drive. Most of my formatting and creating of partitions is with Linux, and it takes no where as near as long as this is taking. I am thinking that as it formats it is putting a windows file system onto the hard drive (98 is FAT i believe. Anyone who could help me out is thanked in advance.

shane

 

[Blujacket]

If the drive is a single partition over 2GB/2047MB, it can only be formatted as FAT32 with the Win95B/95C/98/98SE/ME boot disk. If a floppy disk is used with the format /s command it will indeed make the drive bootable.

The Win98 CD will install the operating system after the formatting has completed but you could stop it and delete all the files, shouldn't hurt a thing and the drive will remain partitioned and formatted. Could even wait until it is plugged into his computer and he can delete all the files, it shouldn't cause boot problems as it is not the System/boot drive, C: is.