Having loads of laptop problems today! Ive been meaning to format it for a while to start a fresh as I have had loads of software problems recently. I keep on getting cycle redundancy check errors too.

Ive got a Windows Xp Home reinstallation CD and Im sure when Ive used it in the past ive just booted from the CD and its come up with the formatting options then it installs windows once the HD is formatted.

This time i tried to boot from the CD and it loads up as usual, but instead of going to the format options it just starts to loads stuff up at the bottom of the screen, eventually it says starting windows and goes back to dos where it crashes with an error but i cant remember what it says!

If I try to boot from a floppy disk it goes to the dos prompt, but anything I type in except DIR it returns with bad command or file error, even WIN. It wont let me change the directory either.

Is there any other way to format my hard disk?

Please help! Getting very annoyed with my laptop now!

have you used FDISK before??,


you need to have fdisk.exe on a bootable floppy, then you can remove exisiting partition, and re create and format a new partition, that should do it.


(clear as mud??)

Ray

Go to www.bootdisk.com and download a full bootdisk i.e. a win98 one should do the job, boot from it and use the format command from the disk, or failing that use fdisk and delete the partition(s) your windows cd should work properly then

Cheers

Alex

beat me to it ray, ecosse, the boot disk u r using is prob a 98 one and you cant see the c: on your hdd because it is partitioned in a way that the windows98 file system does not recognise, using fdisk is prob the easiest way of wiping it, you should only have to remove the existing partition, then boot from the cd and it should hopefully do the rest

Probably stating the obvious here but are you sure you are booting from the cd?

Yeah was booting from the CD, deleted the partition, re booted from the CD and it seems to be working. Although its been on 34% for a long time now

Its going very slow anyway, so fingers crossed.

34% of the format? If it stays there for too long it might mean a knackered hard drive.

What make is the hard drive. Download the manufacturers utilities, you can usually make a floppy and boot from it and they are freely available. They are programs like Seatools or Maxblast and will probably be able to repair any bad sectors or mark them as unusable in the boot sector so your drive will ignore them in future. I've saved a few drives with them in the past. Hitachi does one as well, here's a page with a few more together.

if you are getting the crc errors on your hard drive then it fubar'd New drives are not expensive though so all is not lost and fitting them takes about 10 minutes including a fag break.

This one has always done the trick for me:
Seagate DiscWizard

some features (mainly low level formating) arnt avalible unless it's a a segate disc
but if you do a zero fill then format as NTFS (or XP bootable if you want)