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Hard Drive Format on a CompaQ

  • 06-03-2005 06:27PM
    #1
    Lydesia
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭


    I have a 3 year old CompaQ notebook (the overheating ones) and there are 4 OS's on it (dont ask!) anyways, i got a fresh copy of XP Pro which i want to install. Im trying to format the drive.
    The notebook was dropped a few months ago and the DVD-Rom drive got jammed in it, so i have no floppy drive.

    I made a boot cd-rom disc and installed the MS-DOS start-up files.
    Grand that worked, however none of the format commands will work.

    A:\>format C: /s

    \Invalid command line paramater specified.



    fdisk will work, brings me to:

    1. Create partition
    2. Delete partition
    3. Select bootable partition
    4. Rewrite master boot record

    So i select delete, it askes me : Enter number of partitions to delete..

    I say 1, it says you cannot do this in standard mode.





    Any ideas?


Comments

  • #2
    Chalk
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,315 ✭✭✭Chalk


    boot from the xp cd.
    that will format the drive before installation


  • #3
    Lydesia
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭Lydesia


    Chalk wrote:
    boot from the xp cd.
    that will format the drive before installation

    Rats i forgot about saying that in the post, when i ask XP to format the drive it just IGNORES my command. No response


  • #4
    Lydesia
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭Lydesia


    Arghhhhh somebody else got any suggestions?


  • #5
    Lydesia
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭Lydesia


    Please someone....


  • #6
    greglo23
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,027 ✭✭✭greglo23


    write zero`s to the drive. xp will only load properly on an unformatted drive. it sees it on boot and asks you what you want to do. if you google for it as zero fill you should find loads of stuff out there.


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  • #7
    Lydesia
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭Lydesia


    greglo23 wrote:
    write zero`s to the drive.

    What do you mean by this?


  • #8
    NotMe
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,287 ✭✭✭NotMe


    What make is your harddrive? The manufactors website should have some disk utility that you can download to do a zero fill the drive. Here's a description for Seagate drives: http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/ata_llfmt_what.html


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