need help formatting harddrive

[garytmib]

i bought a new drive and want to use the old one to back up. when i right click on the drive and select format i get a windows message that says windows cannot format this drive, quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of this drive. then try reformatting again.

any ideas?
thanks,
gary

 

[Macro2]

Yeah, get a win98 or me startup FLOPPY disk and boot from it into DOS.
You'll be at the A:\ prompt after you select boot with CDROM support (doesn't matter)
Then type FORMAT D:\ and enter. Answer y. press enter.
Only do this if the HD you want to format is the D:\ drive. Otherwise substitute the correct drive letter.

 

[tenoc]

You might want to partition the new disk before formatting.

Use the fdisk command at the dos prompt.

 

[Macro2]

I guess it wasn't clear which drive he was wanting to format. I thought it was the old drive. Then again he may have several partitions on that drive and might want to use fdisk to delete them?

 

[tenoc]

Yeah, "this drive" is pretty non-specific.

It just sounded like nothing had been done to the new one.

 

[Muck]

You'll need a 98 startup floppy because ME's doesn't contain format.com.

 

[ledzepp98]

What brand of hard drive is it? I know Maxtor and Western Digital for example have bootdisks that will prepare the drive for normal use (basically partition and format, they come with retail drives, not oem, but they can be downloaded from their respective websites). Otherwise, as stated, you can use a win98 boot disk and use fdisk to create partitions and the format command to format the drive (assuming you will be using fat32, you didn't mention the OS)