Lost Hard Drive

Recently I bought a second hand laptop for the purpose of trying out programs before installing them on my main machine. However, and this is where I need help, the person selling it had obviously tried to install Linux on a machine which stood no chance of handling it. OK, so I will format the drive and load something more sensible like Win98 on it. Unfortunately although the hard drive is recognised as existing as is the floppy drive, there doesn't seem to be any way I can get the machine to tell me what the drive letter is for the hard drive.
I have been through the alphabet but nothing. On boot, upto the limited point that it gets to, it says it is 0 and the type of disk.
Can anyone suggest how I can gain access to the hard drive so I can format it and load the lower level OS of Win98 on it? I have the file for formating it but cannot find the drive volume

Any suggestions would be appreciated

 

you'll need to put fdisk (or a derivative) on your floppy if it's not already there. you also have to make sure the format.com command is there too.

if you have another 98 box, both fdisk.exe and format.com can be found in the C:\Windows\Command\ folder. just stick it on the boot disk and run fdisk, then format.com

to use fdisk, you'll need to delete all logical partitions first (if they exist), then the primary partitions. You then make a primary partition at the fullest size possible. afterwards, it'll tell you that you need to reboot. go ahead and do that. boot from the floppy and format the drive (the drive letter should be there but inaccessible due to no formatting). Voila! you can now install windows 98!

 

Thanks Strogg I will give it a shot