Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

I was given a eMachines T-1120 that had a ton of spyware, corrupted
files, yada, yada, yada. I want to wipe the drive, install a
partition for DOS and reinstall XP on a clean drive.


First off XP does not use the DOS system - it uses something called
NFTS.

You need to wipe and reload the OS - you can get a copy of the
necessary files from bootdisk.com that will fire up the floppy drive
and let you go thru thru the steps of reformatting - you just need to
do some reading on NFTS.

Also, make sure that you have the drivers for your computer - floppy,
CD ROMs, Sound card, etc.

The idea was to just format the drive a couple of times (I think the
government standard is 7 times or something like that) to remove all
the crap, install DOS and reinstall XP.


If you want/need to have both dos and XP - partitiona the C drives and
load 2 different OS's - one section for XP nd NFTS and omne part for
DOS and Windows 2000.

The problem I ran into is that the reinstall disc for the T-1120 is
missing from the package - I can't get to the C drive to do what I
want to do and I've tried a bunch of ways. I don't have the resources
here and I was having some trouble finding what I needed on the web.


That's what the boot floppy disc is for it opens up to an A:\ promt -
you type CD C:\ to change to the C drive - then you type FDISK and
start the whole time-consuming process of removing your OS and
reinstalling.

So at this point, I have a .exe file that gfretwell was kind enough to
send me that has the appropriate files on it so that I can boot from
floppy, format the drive a few times to get rid of the BS and then
reinstall with a fresh copy of XP.

Most likely the *.exe file is a bunct of DOS *.bat files that brings
you to a dos command prompt. That's your startup disc - you also need
your OS CD and your drivers.

Jim