I have an old 133MHz Pentium II(?). I want to wipe the hard drive clean and start over. How do I do this?
I have a Dell Dimension 4100. What is necessary to view TV via this computer?
Thanks for any information.
The quickest way to wipe a harddisk is to run FDISK from MSDOS and choose Delete DOS partition, then Create DOS partition. Be warned, once you delete it, it is absolutely gone forever.
Note that the DOS fdisk won’t delete extended NTFS partitions. If the drive has NT on it now (or win2k or xp with NTFS partitions) then make sure to delete any extended partitions before you try to use the dos FDISK, or else you will run into a nice catch 22. FDISK will say it can’t delete the extended partition because there are logical drives defined, but when you try to delete the logical drives it can’t understand NTFS so it says there aren’t any to delete. FISK can delete NTFS if it is the primary partition, so if you only have one partition on the drive you are safe.
I’m not familiar with a Dell Dimension 4100 but I imagine any old TV tuner card would work with it.
Oh yeah, one more bit of imporant advice, make sure you have a working boot disk BEFORE you wipe the drive.
Reboot in DOS mode, create your partition(s) using FDISK, and reboot with a boot disk. Format your partition(s), and pop the install disk of your choice in the CD drive and run setup.
A TV tuner card. There are standalone cards, or you can get an all-in-one card like the ATI All-In-Wonder. They are very nice, and come with a RF remote control and some limited video editing capability. I love mine. I can set a TV channel as my desktop wallpaper.