formatting my hard drive w/Windows XP

M

mmistudent

New member
this is rediculous. I can't format my hard drive. Windows XP doesn't have a command prompt that isnt a shell in windows. When I boot from a floppy I can't access my hard drive. I've tried boot disks from Windows 95, 98 and XP. I've tried booting from a CD, same thing. Can't access my hard drive. (dirve C: doesnt exist). I obviously can't reformat in windows cause you can't format the drive windows in running on. I would just pull the drive and format it on my other computer but its older and the system bios only supports up to 30GB. This situation is lame. Very lame. Is windows XP so idiot proof that I can't format my hard drive when I WANT to? Anybody have any ideas? thanks
 
mmistudent said:
this is rediculous. I can't format my hard drive. Windows XP doesn't have a command prompt that isnt a shell in windows. When I boot from a floppy I can't access my hard drive. I've tried boot disks from Windows 95, 98 and XP. I've tried booting from a CD, same thing. Can't access my hard drive. (dirve C: doesnt exist). I obviously can't reformat in windows cause you can't format the drive windows in running on. I would just pull the drive and format it on my other computer but its older and the system bios only supports up to 30GB. This situation is lame. Very lame. Is windows XP so idiot proof that I can't format my hard drive when I WANT to? Anybody have any ideas? thanks
Click to expand...

Is your boot chain set up correctly in the bios (CDROM being the first)?
 
Is the hard drive detected in the BIOS?

If your drive is formated as NTFS, only the XP CD will recognize it (this is if your machine is capable of booting from CD). If not ... boot from 98 floppy ... start the computer with CD ROM support. Insert the XP disk. Change the DOS prompt to represent the CD ROM drive letter that has been assigned by 98 boot disk and type setup.exe.


HTH
 
you're right about the NTFS file system... windows setup recognises my hard drive... however I want to format it. Is there a way I can format within windows setup or is there a way to get to command prompt from windows setup so I can do some formatting?
 
Run through setup .... do a new install .... it should come to a point where it will ask about partitioning and formating.
 
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