formating c drive

[doggonenut]

i have an old 486 pc with win98 on it that i use as a backup pc, i havent used it in a while and i would like to format the hard drive. my prob. is that it will not format through the desktop(r. click on c: format), it will not restart correctly in dos, and i cant seem to create a floppy that will allow a format command on start up, i need advice on alternate ways to format, or a sure fire bootable format command.

[andyswork@beci.net]

I went into windows and made a start up disk, then draged and dropped formatt,scanreg,and a few others. When you drag and drop into floppy make sue you use right click, and copy here. This worked for me. Welcome to the PC Guide.

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One day I will be a pro, Thanks Andy

[This message has been edited by andyswork@beci.net (edited 03-30-2002).]

[ski]

You can also borrow a Win 98 boot floppy from a friend, or create one on any machine that's using Win 98.
But before trying to format your hard drive with it, insert it in the floppy drive, open My Computer, right click on the floppy drive icon, and click on Explore to make sure it contains the ramdrive.sys and setramd.bat files. These are used to set up a ramdrive(temporary storage area in extended memory) which is required when using any of the boot disk's ebd.cab files(format.com is one of them). This is because the disk contains a bunch of generic CD-ROM driver files for running most CD-ROM drives in DOS, and as a result there is no room in conventional memory for the ebd.cab files.

[rond36]

doggonenut, Welcome to The PC Guide Forums.

You can't format your C drive from within Windows. Windows won't let you because it is in use you can format any other drive but C. To make a boot disk in windows go to start-->settings-->control panel-->add and remove programs-->Windows setup tab-->select create startup disk. After you have created a startup disk click on the top link in my signature it will take you to Microsoft's instructions on how to use Fdisk and Format. You don't need to add any files to the boot disk they are already there in the EBD.cab file in compressed form. They will be expanded on to a RAM drive when the floppy is accessed just as ski hinted to in his post.

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How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867)
WindowsBBS.com (http://www.WindowsBBS.com/index.php?referrerid=115) Is back online, check it out

[andyswork@beci.net]

My windows 95 and 98SE start up disk does not have formatt on them, that is why I added em.

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One day I will be a pro, Thanks Andy