formating a drvie

[johnb]

I purchased a dell computer from a large corp that went out of business, they had them all set up on a network.

When I brought the computer home and booted it, it went right into windows 98 and worked fine but I wanted to change it to windows xp prof, so I did a " fdisk /mbr " before I went to format, then when formatting it said cant format a network drive..
What did I do wrong, the system does have a harddrive and the harddrive is set to CS, Can anyone help here, ?

Oh then when I booted up the system, it only shows the drive to be 2014 large not the 10 gig it should be.

Thanks

[edbot]

Hi,

You should be able to simply insert the Windows XP CD and it will take care of all of the formatting for you.

[johnb]

No cant it gets errors while formating and stops half way thru.

[B&T]

If you make a DOS boot disk, and put fdisk on it, then boot with the boot disk and run fdisk - remove all (must be at east 2) partitions - create a new one with the whole drive, then you will be rid of the old stuff and can start clean. That is what I would do. But . . . then WinXP Upgrade will not find Win98 - do you have a Win98 CD?

[SBGlasby]

ran into the same thing last weekend....

Cheesy PC, the CD Drive was not even bootable.

I ended up booting from a WIN 98 boot disk, fdisk the drive.. removing all the partitions, this one had raw " OLD Novel machine", and the Windows CD would not recognize the formatting, so it bombed each time.

after removing the Partitions, format the entire thing in a DOS partition.

then if you want to break the drive up, you can fdisk and reset all you partitions.

You will need Win98 installed if you want to use the XP upgrade disk. But I hear the Newest version of XP, just ask you to put the win 98 Disk in to verify, without having to install.

[edbot]

is your CD an upgrade? or a full installation? The only time Windows Xp will give you a problem is the disk has bad sectors that cant be repaired. If the the DRIVE is bad, typically you can do a low-level format to help repair it. I will try to recreate the circumstance you have with one of my computers.

[johnb]

Downloaded the Low format utility from IBM and spoke with tech, he said to run it on the drive and do a total erase, It never completes at the end, so he said drive is bad.

Shame even though it would still be under warrenty its not covered since it came in a dell machine and has a d infront of the serial. dell must warrenty it..
Thanks everyone..

[Rick_E]

>>>You will need Win98 installed if you want to use the XP upgrade disk. But I hear the Newest version of XP, just ask you to put the win 98 Disk in to verify, without having to install.>>>

That's correct, no need to install the prior version. Just have the prior version CD handy to insert when it is asked for.