formatting and cdrom question

[KingJoe]

I want to wipe my hard drive clean, so I used my windows 98 boot disk that way I would have cdrom support and tried "format c:" at the c: prompt, but I got a "bad command or filename" error. Am I using the wrong command or whats going on? Also Lately my cdrom is acting kind of weird. Sometimes cd's will skip or it will take a long time for my cdrom to find cd's in the drive. The noises are kind of strange too, sometimes it sounds scratchy, or like the motor is on a roller coaster http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif. Any help would be very nice. Thanks

[drizzle]

Did you boot off of the floppy before using the format command? If you did...then from the floppy drive prompt type in format c:.

eg. A:> format c: /q

The '/q' switch on the end is optional and will make format perform a 'quick' format...makes the format only take about 2/3 seconds. Running it from the floppy drive should solve your problem. Wasn't much of a problem, it's just that the format executable wasn't in the current PATH at the time you tried to run it.

If you need to make a system boot disk from Windows 98 and you're at the DOS prompt, you can do so by going into the \windows\command directory and typing in 'bootdisk'. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

About your CD-Rom drive...if it's causing trouble with more than one CD then it's most likely going out. If it's under the manuf. warranty I'd see about having it replaced.


drizzle
http://www.techdrivers.com


[This message has been edited by drizzle (edited 07-28-99).]

[fishboy]

if you are booting from a floppy, you need to run the format c: from a:\