I just moved a 40 gig hard drive from a win98 machine to a win2000 machine. Apparently the drive wasn't installed with large drive support in win98. It only reads 8 gigs in the 2000 machine. How do I unformat and start over without any version of win98?

Is the 40Gb drive the only hard disk or the primary hard disk in the Win2000 machine? If so, it's not a simple solution

However, if you already have a hard disk in the Windows 2000 machine and the 40Gb drive has been added as a second hard disk, then you can do this:

Right-click on My Computer and select 'Manage'.
When the Computer Management window opens, expand the Storage level in the tree and then select 'Disk Management'.
You'll see the hard disks listed on the right.

The 40Gb hard disk should have one 8Gb partition shown and a load of 'free space' to the right of it.

Right-click the 8Gb partition and select 'Delete Partition'. You should then have 40Gb of free space.

Right-click the free space and select 'Create Partition'.

I can't remember what happens after that but it should be fairly obvious. There will probably be an option to select the file system - choose NTFS if you don't ever want to put this hard disk back in a Windows 95/98/ME computer.

Reboot once that's completed.

Go back into the same screen after the reboot. Right-click on the new 40Gb partition and select 'Format'. A full format is better than a 'quick format' as the drive has come from another PC. It will probably take a couple of hours.

Reboot after it's finished and you should then see that it appears in Windows Explorer as an empty 40Gb drive

Let us know if that resolves the problem so we can close this thread (or help you further if necessary) - thanks