format drive

[Cecylia]

you cant format the drive if you're using the drive. boot from a cd or usb drive format it from there. I've tried many times to format my drive when logged on, but you cant.

[need Tos]

See here for more suggestions : Format Hard Drive
http://forums.techarena.in/hardware-...als/493783.htm
USB FLASH DRIVE DOES NOT FORMAT

[Aikonik]

what you are saying would solve it. (though I think booting from a usb drive, well, it makes more sense to boot form a cd, unless you are missing a cd drive or dos disc or winxp disc. To boot from a usb drive you'd need a bootable partition on it)

But anyhow, you and others are confusing the windows concept of drive letter, and "C drive"/"D drive" , with a hard disk drive. a drive letter/ C Drive/ D Drive/ E Drive, c:\ d:\ e:\ , , points to a PARTITION.

A hard disk drive can have many partitions. One formats a drive from another partition. That could be on another physical hard disk drive, or it could be on the same hard disk drive. Furthermore, as you suggest, besides running format from another partition, one has to Not boot off of the partition you are formatting. .Mostly one would boot from a partition with a format facility on it, and format the partition you want to format.

A windows xp installation cd is a good thing to boot off of. People tend to have one, or should, for fixing things. You don't have to have winxp to do it.

A win98 installation cd might be a bit limited.. unuless it has a dos option. Most people with win98 would use a floppy boot disk, though there are cdrom bootable dos discs you can make. And run the format command off of them. You don't have to have win98 "proper" to do it. Just a win98 boot disk will do it.


The golden rule, which most of you don't get.

YOU FORMAT PARTITIONS NOT DRIVES C IS A PARTITION, D IS A PARTITION, E IS A PARTITION,



whether they are patitions on the same drive or a different drive is
another matter. There are expressions Windows uses, to refer to these partitions, Drive Letter, "C Drive"..."E drive".... But they don't refer to the whole drive. Just a partition of one drive. C Drive and D Drive , E drive and F drive, whatever, could be on the same physical hard drive.

I repeat

YOU FORMAT PARTITIONS NOT DRIVES

You are all confusing the two, and all suggesting that you have to be on a different hard disk drive or on a cdrom drive - and booting off it. And that would solve it, but it's not fully tru. You can be on the same hard disk drive too, but a different partition and booting off the/a differnet partition. .

[1Bullet]

diito to Aikonik

YOU FORMAT PARTITIONS NOT DRIVES.

you can't format the partion your using because you are using it, when trying to format windows is running on the partiton. you can create other partions on the same, with other utililities such as partion magic, however you will never remove the operating system is on. if you have a dual boot you could remove any partition again not he one you your using.