If a hard drive is infected with a virus, re-formatting alone is not guaranteed to eradicate it, as the boot sector could have moved!

You may have to run FDISK from a write-protected floppy which has been prepared on a clean machine.

This floppy (I always keep one in my 'toolbox') should be bootable, and have himem.sys and a generic CD driver on it, with an appropriate config.sys file. Autoexec.bat should also load mscdex.exe with the same drive reference as in config.sys - eg d:/mscd0000 (or similar).

There will be room on the floppy for fdisk, format, scandisk, edit and other such tools. The floppy produced during installation of Windows 95 is a good starting point, but nigh on useless on its own!!

When you run FDISK, you must first delete any partitions, re-boot the machine, then FDISK again to create an active partition. Re-boot again, and format the drive.

If the drive is big enough - 1Gb or more - it is wise to copy the win95 directory from the Windows 95 CD onto the hard drive, for two reasons.

One - it's handy when updating drivers...

Two - 95 install has a nasty habit of losing the CDRom!

I love Les Barker's parody of George Formby - 'Reinstalling Windows!'

He's been there!!