trouble formating a hard drvie

[ForceFedFlesh]

im trying to format someones hard drive. problem is that i have to use a bootable cd instead of a floppy, cuz the computer doesnt have a floppy drive.
ne ways, i made a bootable cd. when in command prompt i tried typing "format c:" "format c:\s" and it didnt work is there something im doing wrong.

[jdbnsn]

What type of bootable cd did you make? I have used Maxtor and Western Digital from their home pages and both worked fine. There shouldn't be a command prompt though, you need to go to BIOS and set the boot order to boot only from the CDROM drive and then when you reboot with the disc in the drive it will load up the utility menu. From there you select something like install hard drive and the option to zero fill should be there.

[xmastree]

What type of bootable cd did you make?I've had success with this CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com). There's loads of good stuff on there.

[Cannibal23]

im guessing that this is a windows 98 boot disk / cd. can you verify that the format command is acctually there? are you getting an error if so what is displayed on the screen?

[ForceFedFlesh]

i did change the boot order. i made the cd using Nero.

[XcOM]

if your using a windows 98 boot cd make sure you in the win98 folder on the cd, as the format command is kept on the cd, not copied into the ram disk.

[Canada's Own Falcon]

if the hard drives are completely raw, ie: no image or partition on them whatsoever, you won't be able to format them by calling them c: as c: doesn't exist. You will have to use Fdisk. to do so, Nero, I think, actually has a utility that will allow you to make a booteable cd, that has all the win 9x boot info on it. If not

http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/win_boot.iso

download that, boot off it, run fdisk, make a partition. Restart your computer (leave the cd in, and boot off it again) and then run format C: and things should work fine.

*Note, if you have a SATA drive, you will NEED to use the winXP tool in the installation to format it, DOS WILL NOT recognize SATA drives.
*Note; No win XP doesn't run DOS, it runs a 32bit program called Command.
VERY DIFFERENT.

[ForceFedFlesh]

thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted

[jdbnsn]

thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted


Glad to hear it.

[bigbaddog]

thanx for the replys guys i got the hard drive formatted

Great-how did you do it?

[ForceFedFlesh]

used a windows xp cd.

[nil8]

UBCD4Win

Greatest boot cd ever.

UBCD comes in 2nd.