Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

Register Log in
  • Congratulations wOOdy-Soft on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Formatting hard drive & install Win98

Status
Not open for further replies.
mef930

mef930

MIS
Apr 30, 2003
33
My hard drive died on me. I'm trying to reformat the c drive but i keep getting this message.

Format not supported on drive C:
Format terminated

Do anyone know what this means?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Are you saying you're trying re-format the dead drive? Doesn't that tell you something?

...Mac

Humpty Dumpty was pushed!!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Suspect that you have an error message because you are trying to format the ramdisk that is loaded from the boot disk.
The boot disk loads the ramdisk at the first assignable hard drive slot available.
And if this is truly the problem, you should see the drive assignment as the system is booting up. And it means that the hard drive doesn't have a valid partition that it can use as C:.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Run fdisk and see if the hard drive is even found, and if so what partitions are on it, if any. Or if you have Partition magic try that.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Ok, I will try to check my bios. I did try to run fdisk. It says, "No fixed disks present".

What does that mean?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It means that the BIOS didn't identify a hard drive.
Try getting into BIOS and have it auto ident your drive.
If it won't , you have a bad drive, cable, or something is not set correctly.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Your BIOS should allow you into CMOS setup. One of the choices in CMOS setup may be "identify hard drives", a selection put in to make it easier for users to set their machines up.
But it is also possible that you don't have that choice and would have to enter the parameters manually.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
My award calls it "IDE HDD auto detection"

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

grnzbra
  • Locked
  • Question
Formatting Full Hard Drive 1
Replies
7
Views
775
austinpctech
austinpctech
Sebastian42
  • Locked
  • Question
Getting a drive REdetected
Replies
18
Views
1K
Rick998
Rick998
DTGMI
  • Locked
  • Question
WIN 10 Pro PC & Adding back to our Network
Replies
1
Views
872
pjw001
pjw001
pmonett
  • Locked
  • Question
Cannot install Notes R12 1
Replies
13
Views
741
Rick998
Rick998
dpellegrini
  • Locked
  • Question
Unable to map a drive
Replies
12
Views
897
dpellegrini
dpellegrini

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top