Wipe HDD & Re-Install Windows ME

Anonymous
2021-07-14T08:09:11+00:00

I'm hoping someone can help me out as I'm a little stuck. I have an old Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop running Windows ME. Me intention is to wipe the HDD so I can sell/recycle it safely, but I'm really stuck how to do this.

Few extras:

  • I have a floppy drive, but no floppy disks to create a startup disk (and I'm hoping that's not the only way)
  • I have a "Reinstallation CD WMe" that came with the laptop, but I get the impression it's not something I can boot from. I could be wrong – if it was bootable I expected to be shown the option on startup.

Any advice would be very welcome!

Windows for home | Other | Windows update

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-07-14T16:38:29+00:00

    Thanks for all your support today Dave, really appreciate it.

    The format seems to have gone fine and I'm still in the process of re-installing ME. Hopefully on the home straight!

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  2. DaveM121 935.7K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2021-07-14T14:57:53+00:00

    Hi Taffston,

    That's great, it really is, that will remove all data from the drive and you will then have a clean drive to re-install Windows Millennium onto.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-07-14T14:47:32+00:00

    Think I've got somewhere!

    I opened Windows and inspected the contents of the CD in my D: drive and spotted the system folder was called 'WIN9X'. I rebooted with CD support and landed in cmd again and this time tried:

    D:

    cd win9x

    format C:

    And it seems to be working! It's in the middle of reformatting now!

    Will let you know what happens

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  4. DaveM121 935.7K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2021-07-14T14:35:36+00:00

    Hi Taffston

    Those should not survive a full clan install, and if you canget into Command prompt from the Installation media, this command should format your drive totally and remove all files:

    format C: /q

    I have just looked through all the screenshots you have provided and nowhere do I see the option to format the drive or to enter Command Prompt, this is very strange.

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-07-14T14:20:38+00:00

    All my documents are still there in My Documents and any extra apps I installed myself are still all there. I.e. when windows opens up you wouldn't know you'd done anything. It all looks the same.

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