Formatting a Hard Drive

[kantaru]

I may be going a bit crazy here but a friend of mine has just had a replacement 10GB drive delivered to him from Dell and he asked for my help to install it which I started via telephone.

To start off with I asked him to insert the boot disk that came with his Dell PC which he did and we selected the CD ROM support and loaded into DOS. I then we put the Windows 98 CD in to start but could not install the OS because the hard drive was not formatted. We had a look for FORMAT.COm on the boot disk and it wasn't there so I created another Win 98 Boot disk that contained Format.com and another DOS 6.22 boot disk which also had format.com. We tried it again the follwoins evening and I asked him to type in the follwoing command after booting off the Boot disk and it was FORMAT C: /s but an error message came up that says that the "C" drive was not available. I then asked him to try the following command Format c:/fs:fat and the same error message came up. We then tried to use the format.com on the Win 98 CD and the same error appeared. I then realised that I am not doing anything wrong so it must be that the IDE cable is loose or split or the replacement hard drive does not work.

Unless I am going absolutely crazy, I don't believe that the format process explained was incorrect, or is it?

Thanks and any advise would be great.


Tony

 

[NADIAZIPPER]

You must create a primary partion first, then format the partition. Because you have no partition, you have nothing to format.

 

[wolluf]

As nadiazipper says - you need to create a partition - normally using fdisk command after booting from win98 boot disk (if you've really got a dos 6.22 boot disk - hide it, it will only cause problems installing win98).

Basic steps to install win98:-

1. Boot from win98 boot floppy.
2. Use fdisk command to create a partition to install into.
3. Reboot, and wheb rebooted, run format c:
4. Run 98 setup from disk (usually on E: with win98 boot disk).

 

[roamer1]

hi kantaru

to add to nadiazipper,

this may help you out- The step you are missing is partitioning the harddrive, which must be done PRIOR TO FORMAT. Partitioning is performed by the FDISK utility, so pay attention to that part particularly.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q221829

 

[roamer1]

lol! Hi wolluf, didn't see ya comin'... as usual, concise, and to the point.

 

[jonhiker]

Boot from your W98 boot disk. Change to C: and then type in FDISK.

Create your partition or more, if desired. Then format, then you should be able to load W98