How do I uncompress a stubborn drive

[FrustratedUser]

We are wanting to reformat the c drive and reinstall windows 95 on an older computer. We know how to do this, but are told our c drive is compressed. When we try to uncompress it, we get a message that the drive has errors and to run ScanDisk to fix them. ScanDisk doesn't find any errors. So therefore we can't uncompress the drive or format the c drive or reinstall windows 95. Our computer has a multitude of "sins" and problems, so needs to be reformated. What do we do next? Help us out!

[jdc2000]

What I would do is make sure that you have backup copies of any file(s) you want to save, then just FDISK the drive and reformat. Do know what the capacity of the drive is? I would not use compression if I could avoid it.

[Murray S.]

Howdy:

Take a look at the following..

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000283.htm

Murray

[Alfons]

An easy way to do that is to "zero" the drive - this means writing zeros to every location on the hard drive. This "destroys" all data and configuration settings on the drive and essentially giving you a drive with a blank personality. Combining this with a write-verify diagnostic will also give your drive a good checkout. These utilities are normally available from the drive manufacturer's site and downloadable executable programs - when you run these programs they (with your help) will make a bootable floppy disk that contains the utilities and/or diagnostics.

If you have problems finding these, post the make & model of this hard drive and one of us will point you in the right direction.