Formatting C: (System) How hard can it be??

[Jiggerman]

Hey folks,

How hard can it be to re-format a harddisk containing Win2k?? Well when you are like me extreamly difficult!

I'm wanting to reformat my Win 2k Pro machine to do a fresh installation, but I can't force Win 2k to do a reformat, I've tryed running it in Satfe mode with command prompt, booting it with a Win 98 disk, It just doesn't seem to want to work. Am I perhaps using the incorrect command, or sequence of commands??

the line

format C:[\code] worked just fine on Win 98 and Win 95 machines but not 2000 (or as I have tryed XP Pro).

Can anyone give some advice to a bewildered little Sheep??

Thanks for any help

 

[SYAR2003]

boot th PC with the W2K cd .
delete the partition witch is your c:\ during the setup
and create a new one (from the setup-cd).
Thats the way

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi,

Win2K will not let you delete a partition with the active operating system on, so you can use the approach from syar2003 above or boot from a 98 floppy, use FDISK to delete the partitions (use Delete Non DOS if it is NTFS format) and then boot from the 2000 CD.

John

 

[Jiggerman]

My Hard disk doesn't use a partition, Will that make a difference to the plan of action.

Thanks very much for your help!

 

[SYAR2003]

All harddisk's with OS installed are using partitions.
Windows/Linux/Sun/...etc

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi,

Syar2003 is right. A partition is a subdivision of a hard disk. It can use the whole disk (which is most of the time) or a portion of it.
Each partition can be in an appropriate disk format such as FAT32, NTFS, ext2 or whatever. It is facilities such as this that allow dual booting where one operating system can't see the others.
If you don't think you have one, then your hard disk probably only has one partition.

To see your partition layout go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and choose "Disk Management"

You could try deleting the partition from there, but I think it will come up with the same problems as before.

John

 

[Jiggerman]

Thanks very much guy's I managed to solve the problem using the Fdisk app from a 98 machine.

Cheers