I need to format the primary hard drive on one of my laptops, which already has XP installed. I created a boot floppy diskette but when I boot up from it, the computer doesn't even recognize a drive C; it says "invalid directory." The thing is I want to just erase the hard drive, I don't want to install an O/S on it. So how do I go about doing that?
Maybe a live CD, like Knoppix, boot the computer up, then format the hard drive. Or you can download a CD from Seagate, and it will write your whole hard drive to 0.
Probably because your C: drive is NTFS, which you can't see from DOS. Just boot of the XP CD, go into recovery console, and format it from there.
Just go into the BIOS and find something that says "Native Support" if it is enabled then disable it and try to format it.
People, you are missing the main point - YOU HAVE A LAPTOP W/ A FLOPPY DISK DRIVE!?!?! J/K. Harrisment's recommendation is the easiest and quickest way to do it. It saves you the extra step of downloading and burning to CD the other solutions recommended here.
You can format directly with your XP cd. 1) Go to boot options and set to boot from CD drive 2) Insert XP cd into cd drive 3) Computer will load from XP cd 4) Just follow the directions and delete the partitions you don't want and format
Didnt the XP CD will install the OS into HDD after format? I will suggest take out the HDD from your notebook and plug the HDD into a USB 2.5" external Harddisk Casing and connect it to a PC or notebook and format from there!
The problem with this method is that it won't allow you to format without installing the O/S. That's why he needs to use the recovery console.
Does your boot disk have some utilities loaded? Usually it will have fdisk, if you have that run it and you can format whole drive or partitions.
That's correct... So just boot up from the XP CD and then go through the recovery steps? Will it force me to re-install the O/S thereafter? Thanks for the suggestions, guys...
No, it won't force you to install the OS if you do it from the recovery console. ------------------------------------------- Starting the Windows Recovery Console To start the Windows Recovery Console, use one of the following methods: • Use the Windows Setup floppy disks or the Windows CD-ROM to start your computer. At the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press F10 or press 'R" to repair. FORMAT format drive: /Q /FS:file-system Use this command to format the specified drive to the specified file system. In the command syntax, /Q performs a quick format of the drive, drive is the drive letter of the partition to format, and /FS:file-system specifies the type of file system to use such as FAT, FAT32, or NTFS. If you do not specify a file system, the existing file system format is used if it is available. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
Anybody knows what it means if a hard drive gets stuck formatting and will not finish? Here's the story: Came home from work last night and had a message against a black screen referencing one of the ethernet drivers that I had never seen before. I had never seen this type of message before either... it wasn't a popup of some sort in Windows, and it wasn't a blue screen. Should have written it down, but I didn't. I don't remember much more of what it said other than it was referencing something for the ethernet drivers. So I think, fine, let's try to restart. It won't boot, gets stuck. After about ten minutes, I turn it off and power back on. It gives me the options to boot into safe mode, normally, or last known good config. I try normally again. Boot screen comes up and then computer reboots. So then I try last known good config. No response, computer freezes, doesn't even get to boot screen. I let it sit for a little bit, then manually reboot it and try safe mode with networking. Same thing. Next thing I try is just straight safe mode. This time after a couple of minutes a status bar comes up across the bottom. I walk away and come back and it says the sys32\hal.dll is corrupt or missing. Fine, I'll restore from the Media Center disk. Pull the disk out, boot into the disk and look for the option to restore. It's not there. So then I decide to reformat. I choose the existing partition that has the OS (Media Center) on it, go through the prompts to delete it, and on the very last one the computer reboots itself. I went through the process again and manage to delete the partition. So I try to format it NTFS Quick. It gets up to 20% and then sits there for two hours. 100 gig 2.5 drive... don't remember if it's IDE or SATA. It's about two years old. I've done this several times before, and don't remember it taking hours to format on Quick. So i reboot the machine and try it again, but do the regular (i.e. not quick) NTFS format. Went to bed, woke back up today and the computer had rebooted itself. Turned it back on and went back into the install disk again and it shows that the drive had been partitioned. I choose to install on the reformatted partition, and it then tells me that I have an incomplete or unusable partition on this drive. I try the quick ntfs option again. It's been sitting now for a couple of hours again stuck on 20%. I walked in at one point and the hard drive was making an "EEP" "EEP" "EEP" type of noise. It didn't last for very long. Is my hard drive toast? Is there anything else I can do? Would trying to reformat through the repair console make a difference? Any other ideas?
