reformatting with a foreign disc

[jasondan16]

i have 2 computers that need the hard drive wiped out and reinstalled. one computer is my brother in laws and does not contain a disk (internal or cd rom). i have tried using an older disc to reformat it but i recieve a message of "disc not meant for this computer" the computer supposedly has windows 2000xp home edition and i was trying to reformat with a win 98 disk. is there any way to pull this off?

also the 2nd computers hard drive came with the reformatting disc. but when i sent it off for repair the repairman updated the windows version and now the computer will not recognize the reformatting disc. is there anyway to fix this?

thank you
jason

[whoozhe]

First a hard drive is the same in any country.
It appears you are trying to reformat a NTFS formatted drive in a Windows 98 machine.
Add the WindowsXP drive as a slave to you existing Windows 98 system.
Create a Windows Start Up Disk with Windows 98 (See Windows 98 Help Files for instructions)
Boot up with the Start up floppy disk.
You should see an A: prompt .
The start up disk will allocat the following drive letters.
A: for floppy, C: for main Hard Drive, D: for a temporary Ram Drive, E: for the CD drive and F: for the Slave Hard Drive.

At the A: Prompt type "fdisk f:" (without quotes)
You should see a menu.
1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information
5. Change current fixed disk drive

Note item 5 will only appear if the system sees the two Hard Drives. It is doesn't then stop the process.

Now go to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=255867#5
and follow the tutorial