Need Help Fast!!!

Never used 2k, but all the other os's its in system tools.

Boot from the CD and follow the prompts to format the disk.

Yeah, mrtee said it. XP comes with a really easy format for you to format and do a clean install on your harddrive

XP wouldn't format my HD. Had to do it before I loaded XP on. Please don't ask me why, don't know.

go to bootbisk.com i hope that's right... and download an xp boot disk image... put it onto a floppy and boot from that... from windows before you reboot check to make sure the file Format.com is on the disk... if not find it on your Hard Drive and put it on there... then reboot... type format/s ... hmmm... after that you want to reboot from the XP CD and all should go fine... my friend just had the same problem last week... this worked for him

WOM, probably because your drive at one time had the ontrack format on it with the drivers in the mbr for the large disk support and ATA100. I've run into that a couple of time and really burns you because it is so far apart when it happens, you don't seem to remember the second time around until half way through a fit and you pull a Homer and slap your forhead and say DuOH

So drives were coming preinstalled for a bit, before XP came about and when you formated, there was a second hidden copy in a protect area on the disk that you could only blow aywa with a lower level debug routine.

wow here this is a really easy way of doing this I dont know were all these other people learned puters but you could always go to command prompt and type "format c:"
were c is the letter of your hard drive

no

not in NT you can't

you can go to the prompt and type format c and it will prompt you that the drive is in use and lock and would you like to unlock it and when you say yes it will tell you if couldn't

But you could also boot from a floopy and do it before hitting window nt, then again it wouldn't read the ntfs format unless you had something like Winternatanls NTFSDOS boot disk...

so it is either a low level, NTFSboot disk, or inside the install

which is not hard, it is actually one of the first real options you are offered.

By the way, I learned computers starting in 1986 on one of the first ibm pc's, you know, no hard drive two 360k floppys and it was a monster...

Of course you could always run at the command line

debug: c800 ( or what ever rombios area your drives IDEchipset registers to, so you can enter the onboard(on the hard drives motherboard) cmos, and use brute force to kick it into a factor format, though it would blow your mapped bad sectors which are stored on the drive in a hidden area and in the on chip cache which would no longer match up so you would find bad sectors later on at the most un oppertune time.

why, were did you learn computers?

I started my computer experience on a machine called a rgb 16 it hooked up to you tv it had a cassete tape player for programs and a cassete system and it is label both ibm and apple and was sold by radio shack

and by the way the last time I formated I did exactly what I said to do and had no problems i am running xp

just kidding...

formatting NTFS / NT drives when doing a clean install is always best done when you are actually running the install...

Why?

Because the new OS is going to keep track of all bad sectors and start its own records of your hardware and drive statistics. So there is no question of anything messing with it. If upgrading you leave it be, do the upgrade and the convert to NTFS after the install is finished...
DO not run Norton DiskDoctor on an XP NTFS formatted hard drive, XP writes sercurity information in a different location and Norton see's it as being incorrect, and if you happen to say yes fix it, when you reboot you are going to learn how to recover your drive without loosing data, or end up redoing your drive from scratch Depends on what you feel your up to I guess, me I've spent more than a few days and nights recovering customers drives. Though Norton might have fixed this issue with 2003 System Works, I for one would not trust it...

you did, from inside windows SXP at a dos promot, it just took off anf formatted the dirve?

XP

I don't consider my trash 80 a comouter...

computer

well it wasent much of a computer but it was my first it was latter upgraded to a tandy which I still dont consider to much of a computer

btw, why in the world would you format a drive NTFS if you are going to do a clean install when it is one of the main options when you pick the partition to install to, if you want to keep the dos or win32 format or reformat NTFS leading up to the actual install of the OS?

no they were not much, but the only thing going and a blast to sit in front of for hours on end

remember when arcades came out with Space Invaders?

Could you see kids today getting into like when we were their age?

pong !

yeah I was real young when i got that rgb 16 I was about 4 and computers today just amaze me every day, have you seen anything about the guy that is makein a quantum mechanics computer, when the idea was first introduced the NSA took the idea and might have built one of these babies for code breaking they wont say weather they have or not but the speed of these things is millions times faster than anything thats around now, they can take a problem that would have taken I think it was a million year in three months

figure it out
damn i need some english skills lol

my idea was easy... boot from a boot disk... and you won't see get the error about disk in use...my friend couldn't format his HD from the xp cd the other day wierd... booted from a disk and formatted it... then it installed fine.. wierdest thing...

there are a lot of parts going into that, one of which is a holographic drive that IBM has been working on for the last 6 years, it is now 1 inch X 1 inch cube and it can hold all of the records in the Library of congress, the Smithsonian (every branch) and not even to begin to make a dent in it.

There is also a molecular drive, were they indent molecules in one direction or the other with a high speed laser which is supposed to be something on the order of 1000 times the compact of the Holographic drive and they are also working on making ram out of it.

Nano tubes have been made for two years now, but they were stuck with not being able to bond them together, they have now learned how to actually weild them together at anything, there is talk of making use of them for high-speed tight band communications in possibly in conjunction with teleportation of light across (through) them as a means to ensure direction and end point of transmition. blink and it was done nano seconds before you thought to blink

yep...

we will end up spending from $0.00 up to trillion(s)? for this war in Iraq, neat huh?

mind boggling...

well dont get me started on the war with irag but that computer that uses quantum mechanic is not usein that optical drive by the way it holds a terabyte the last time i checked and it only keep its integrety for about an hour they have also figure out how to do many other amazing things with computers in fact more than I want to talk about in a msg forum if you want we can talk in some kind of chat room but other than that i am done here good sir you seem to know what you are talkin bout I give ya props

no props needed, and always into tech
its the future
if ya aint with it, ya aint in it

you have a good evening and anytime