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akasha2112
09-08-2000, 10:30 PM
I have a PII 300, with 128 mb sdram, 9.1 gig ultra-2 scsi hard drive, asus p2b-s motherboard. My system crashed, windows is gone, and I am trying to reformat the hdd. I can only bootup from my windows 98 2nd edition startup disk, it will bootup with cd-rom support. When I try to format drive C: it says, format not supported on drive C: . It won't run fdisk either, says it can't find a valid fat 32 file system. It is the only hard drive in the system.
Any suggestions? I'm stumped.
thank you
ReddDogg
09-08-2000, 11:58 PM
my guess is that your scsi adapter taht your hard drive is plugged into is not recognized by the boot disk... is the cd rom your d: drive or your e: drive when you boot up with boot disk? When you use a winders boot disk it is supposed to make your hard drive the c: drive, make the d: drive a temp drive, and e: drive becomes cd rom (unless you have more than one partition).

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Joe Redd
MCP
akasha2112
09-09-2000, 02:20 AM
It recognizes the hard drive as the c: drive but it does not function. The scsi adapter is built in to the main board, and it isn't having any problem recognizing the drive. The main partition has been deleted. The bios sees the drive as well.
ReddDogg
09-09-2000, 07:37 PM
the main partition has been deleted? if you run fdisk there are no partitions? Or will it even let you run fdisk?

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Joe Redd
MCP
akasha2112
09-09-2000, 09:12 PM
It won't even let me run fdisk.
ixl
09-10-2000, 12:51 AM
Have you tried running a low-level diagnostic on the drive from whatever company made it?

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Paleo Pete
09-11-2000, 12:09 PM
What are the exact error messages you get at bootup, in fdisk, and when you try to format.

Sounds to me like your hard drive might be toasted.

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)
akasha2112
09-11-2000, 06:15 PM
I was able to format it using the scsi utility at bootup, thanks.