I am building a computer system and I have a hard drive I pulled out of an old Compaq. I was using FDisk on it and I was trying to delete the primary DOS parition, only to find the volume label was a string of extended characters. I cannot delete the parition unless I can type the charaters into FDisk. I was wondering if there is any way to type extended characters using a normal keyboard while using FDisk. Any suggestions?
If you press and hold the ALT key and type numbers from 128 to 255 on the numeric keypad, you should be able to generate extended chracters, i.e.:
Alt-140 î
Alt-150 û
Alt-160 á
Alt-170 ¬
Alt-180 ┤
Alt-190 ╛
Alt-200 ╚
Alt-210 ╥
Alt-230 µ
With trial-and-error you may find the characters you need.
Thanks, that worked great! One hard drive for me. 
Partiton Magic (even an older version) should de able to delete the old partiton and re-partition the drive without the need to enter the extended characters.
see also
You could also find our what brand of hard drive you have and download the low-level format utility from the manufacturer.
That will write zeros all over your drive and do a better job of obliterating everything in its path (including all partitions).
The following debug script will also write all 0s to the partition table:
Boot into DOS mode and type debug at the command prompt and hit enter. If you get an error about file not found, type cd c:\windows\command and try again. If you still get an error, try to locate an old DOS 5.0 disk and copy it from there to your hard drive, then try again.
at the debug prompt, type the following in, hitting enter after each line ( – Press Enter again – means hit the enter key a second time without typing anything):
A 100
INT 13
– Press Enter again –
RAX
0301
RBX
0200
F 200 L 200 0
RCX
0001
RDX
0080
P (at this point you will several lines of information)
Q
NOTE: Debug is NOT for the faint-of-heart!! one mistype of the above commands could conceivably render your entire computer useless.
That being said, however, I have this typed into a script file and whenever I need to completely repartition a hard drive I would use this script, especially with Compaq hard drives. One thing to keep in mind with older Compaq hard drives is that they usually had a small, hidden partition used for a softBIOS and diagnostic utilities, and many times the above script was the only way to get rid of them completely. The downside is that if the Hard drive is going back into a Compaq computer, it would need to be re-setup with this partition for the appropriate computer model it was being installed into.
critter42
Egad folks:
label [volume:][label]
e.g.
label c:simple
or better yet
label c:
Sheesh.