Formatting hard drives

[kaon]

I want to format the hard drive on my laptop but it doesn't have a floppy drive. Is it possible to format the hard drive without using a portable floppy drive for the boot disk? If so how?

 

[Aussie_Knight]

if you have a cd drive it can be done using that kind of medium - but i'm unsure on how to set one up. I suggest you visit the windows(or whatever operating system you use) website and search the knowledge base.

 

[bucko]

I think it's possible to do it through MSDOS without a boot.

 

[tdcockers]

if you have a windows 98 cd, stick it in and boot from that. when it asks what you want to boot from, say cd. then when it asks what you want to boot, say command prompt with cd (not sure of exact wording)

then when the command prompt comes up, type "cd <cd drive>:\\win98" then hit enter

then type format c:

and then wait. it takes ages.

alternately, get yourself a copy of partition magic. install it in windows and run it from there. it will reboot the system and format however you like it automatically. and it formats much faster than msdos format.

have fun

 

[Anonymous]

I want to format the hard drive on my laptop but it doesn't have a floppy drive. Is it possible to format the hard drive without using a portable floppy drive for the boot disk? If so how?

Do you have a CD ROM drive?

Format your hard drive as normal in DOS and when re-booting, get into your computer's bios.

In your bios, change the order of boot sequence so it recognises the CD ROM first. If you have your Windows CD in the CD ROM, your cpu will load the Windows operating system.

To access the bios, you either hit the DEL key or one of the F keys during the initial booting. The monitor tells you which key during the boot up sequence.

 

[kaon]

Thanks for everyone’s help.

I managed to do it just after I posted the message. I was just having a problem with changing the boot sequence because I couldn't get into the bios.

 

[Paranoid]

Yep, accessing Laptops/Notebooks BIOS isn't always obvious. Different manufactures use different keys (generally a function key) and commonly don't display that info during booting.

They like to call it a "challenge", in reality its just a pain in the arse. ](*,)