Reformatting a Vista PC, back to Win98

[Phil W]

My father-in-law has a reasonable spec PC running Vista.

His hobby is radio scanning (ham radio) and the PC programs he uses are outdated and not supported by Vista.

He would like me to re-format his hard drive and install Windows 98, a system he is more familiar with (at the age of 82 he didn't like the change to Vista in the first place!) and that will run the programs he wants.

I've tried format c: from the c-prompt in safe mode but it tells me that the file system is NTFS and asks for the current volume label for drive c:

I used 'dir' to get what I thought would be the label but this was incorrect.

Can anybody help me to do this please?

As you can probably tell, I'm at the 'novice' level!

Phil

[-pops-]

Remember that Windows 98 is ten years old - which is an awful long time in computer terms.

You will have to go back to a "low level format" before you are able to reformat in the FAT file system. It is not easy to format from NTFS to FAT.

If you know the make of the hard drive, look on the manufacturers web site for the low level format facility. Otherwise have a look at http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

Be aware, though, that W98 will not be able to use much of the available space of a modern hard drive and it may even be that other hardware may not function properly with such an old operating system.

Have you investigated "compatibility mode" on the Vista machine? It may be that you could get the old programs to work on that. I don't have Vista but I recall that I could get W98 programs to work in XP by using that mode of working.