Hard Drive Format on a CompaQ

Lydesia

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?

Chalk

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

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

Lydesia

Arghhhhh somebody else got any suggestions?

Lydesia

Please someone....

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.

Lydesia

greglo23 wrote:

write zero`s to the drive.

What do you mean by this?

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