formatting new hard drive

[snapawn]

:confused: i just built my first computer. its a budget thing, i installed a 98 boot disk, powered it on, done the fdisk thing and answered #1 to each of the menu options. The partitian thing went good, restarted with boot disk, i got an 'a' prompt so i typed: format c:/s now i keep getting "bad command". why? i than typed extract ebd.cab format.com and it comes back with "error: error creating destination file format.com from cabinet file ebd.cab" why is it doing this,? i dont see anything obviously wrong with the bios.

[Reid]

A typical boot disk will create a virtual drive in memory (ram drive). When booting with the floppy, look for the line that says, "The diagnostics were successfully loaded to drive x:", Change to the drive letter that is in place of the 'x'. You will find FORMAT and other utilities there.

Congratulations on your first build. It means that you did a lot of things right to get that far.

[Steve]

If it keeps coming up with a "bad command", try format c: /s

Make sure there is a space between the : and the /

[snapawn]

Thanks Steve and Reid for your reply on my hard drive format issue. Its up and running now I used a differant boot disc.

[Darren]

I read somewere that the /s switch was no longer supported..? is there truth in this?

[Budfred]

Darren,

No longer supported where. Since the s/ switch is a DOS command, it is still supported in DOS environments. However, XP is no longer DOS based, so it is only supported indirectly and probably not very useful in an XP system.

Budfred

[Darren]

What about Windows Me?

[gopi_vs]

Win ME and above do not support the /S attribute. A Win 98 disk can be used for transferring the system files.

[mjc]

The most versitile boot disk is the Win98 version, ME's just doesn't cut it. And XP doesn't really have a "bootdisk".

[iisbob]

And XP doesn't really have a "bootdisk"


Now, Now MJC-you know better than that! ;)

There are Floppy boot disks available from MS; if your system doesnt support CDROM booting, or if you happen to have a few systems without a CDROM for some reason.

And once you are inside XP; you can create a generic bootable floppy disk by simply right clicking on a floppy in the drive, select Format..then choose " Create an MSDOS startup disk ".


Tho the '98 bootdisk is stil a great little tool; it's better if you create your custom one.

By the way, i would have suggest that you Debug the drive before you attempt to partition/format it-that way you know it's completely safe to install your windows version.