trouble formating a hard drvie
im trying to format someones hard drive. problem is that i have to use a bootable cd instead of a floppy, cuz the computer doesnt have a floppy drive.
ne ways, i made a bootable cd. when in command prompt i tried typing "format c:" "format c:\s" and it didnt work is there something im doing wrong.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
What type of bootable cd did you make? I have used Maxtor and Western Digital from their home pages and both worked fine. There shouldn't be a command prompt though, you need to go to BIOS and set the boot order to boot only from the CDROM drive and then when you reboot with the disc in the drive it will load up the utility menu. From there you select something like install hard drive and the option to zero fill should be there.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
Quote:
Originally Posted by jdbnsn
What type of bootable cd did you make?
I've had success with this CD. There's loads of good stuff on there.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
im guessing that this is a windows 98 boot disk / cd. can you verify that the format command is acctually there? are you getting an error if so what is displayed on the screen?
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
i did change the boot order. i made the cd using Nero.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
if your using a windows 98 boot cd make sure you in the win98 folder on the cd, as the format command is kept on the cd, not copied into the ram disk.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
if the hard drives are completely raw, ie: no image or partition on them whatsoever, you won't be able to format them by calling them c: as c: doesn't exist. You will have to use Fdisk. to do so, Nero, I think, actually has a utility that will allow you to make a booteable cd, that has all the win 9x boot info on it. If not
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/win_boot.iso
download that, boot off it, run fdisk, make a partition. Restart your computer (leave the cd in, and boot off it again) and then run format C: and things should work fine.
*Note, if you have a SATA drive, you will NEED to use the winXP tool in the installation to format it, DOS WILL NOT recognize SATA drives.
*Note; No win XP doesn't run DOS, it runs a 32bit program called Command.
VERY DIFFERENT.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
Quote:
Originally Posted by ForceFedFlesh
thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted
Glad to hear it.
Re: trouble formating a hard drvie
Quote:
Originally Posted by ForceFedFlesh
thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted
Great-how did you do it?