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Can anybody tell me if it is possible to format a hard drive from the BIOS as i have picked a used one up and want to format, and i can,t do it from my XP disk, It gets so far into the format from the disk then won’t let it go no further and crashes, I would have tried to format the old fashioned way by using FDISK on a floppy, as the HDD used to have WIN M.E on it but I don’t use floppy disks as my comp hasn’t got one installed, any help appreciated.
has it got a cd drive installed.. if by any means.. you could always make a cd rom start of disc and put fdisk onto it, and boot from cd.. or maybe download fdisk, boot into the ms dos promt without loading the operating system, and then run fdisk from c: ?
No you cant format from the BIOS however you can boot from the XP installation CD.
Enter your BIOS/CMOS and configure your computer to boot from your CD drive and not your HDD. Now place your XP installation disc into the drive and save the changes and exit.
When your computer restarts it will recognise the XP disc as non emulating disc and you will be given the option to boot from the disc by pressing any button. You will now be able to format your HDD from there. I have always been able to format the complete HDD using this method.
You should have no problems formating your HDD by booting from the disc.
If the above does’nt work you can always force your comp to format a drive through Disk management.
The above is correct, pre Windows XP, a start-up or system disk was used for this purpose. Another way, you can format the drive is if you add the drive as a slave. You can then format the drive by going to my computer and right clicking on the drive, looking down the list you will see the word format , click on that. To format the drive.
@dragonfly1 wrote:
The above is correct, pre Windows XP, a start-up or system disk was used for this purpose. Another way, you can format the drive is if you add the drive as a slave. You can then format the drive by going to my computer and right clicking on the drive, looking down the list you will see the word format , click on that. To format the drive.
You can boot from the XP installation disc and format the HDD.
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