[newbie] particition magic etc.

[Don and Alexa Pongracz]

Hi, one more time the computer has crashed. I am beginning to think that the drive has been damaged, from before when I had a virus etc. My husband has an older computer, Pentium 2 that he has said I can set up Linux on. He would like to try to reformat my drive and take the time to figure out where we went wrong. In other words start from scratch. As I have no operating system ie: I can get to login: in something similar to dos but it does not boot, is there any way to 1. login and get my files 2. Reformat the drive using particion magic (we have the program)   Many thanks in advance,   Alexa