formatting Haaaaard Drive

[thommo]

Hi,

I posted a previous thread.."help instaling OS" , now I find my problem is that I can't format my hard drive. I get into fdisk using a bootup disk from http://www.bootdisk.com however when I get into fdisk and attempt to setup partitions, (6.4 gig Quatum KA) I wish to have partitions larger than 2047 megs. However I am not able to make two partitions 2 gigs c: and a 4 gig d:. Insted I choose to see if I could setup the OS so i siple made the entire c: 6.4 gigs. Upon rebooting and attempting to install win 95 i get this dos message under c: :

"invalid medai type reading drive c
Abort/Fail......."

I somehow have to format and setup the partitions but how ????????
please help!!

thanking you in advance,
thommo

[mike_ny1974]

what boot disk did you down load from www.bootdisk.com? (http://www.bootdisk.com?) you should download the windows 98 boot disk. this boot disk enables larger disk support. with the windows 95 boot disk, you cant have a partition larger than 2 GB. but the win98 has fat32 and it wil lwork . try that. if not, your BIOS may not be able to recognize a hard disk that large. if you go to the hard drive manufacturers web page you can download a disk overlay program that will over look that.

[Bleep]

My guess is that you did not make the partition on C active.
Bleep

[scotter]

if you are using windows 95 you have to format in fat 16 win 95 has no suport for fat 32 except version 95osr2c and and if I'm not mustaken only the last version of windows (osr2c) supported partitions bigger than 2 gig's play it safe if your loading windows 95 format with fat 16 and set your partitions to 2 gig's each there easyer to defrag anyway /forum/smile.gifor go buy the win98 upgrad disk for 89 $ and have ful support for every thing /forum/smile.gif

[Bob-NB]

Check your post's in your other nearly identical thread...

www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/003095.html (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/003095.html)

The message you are getting is correct.
Your computer will boot to the c drive after fdisk, but the message will appear if you try to format c from c.

You must reboot the computer from the bootdisk that you got from www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com) then it will bring you to the a prompt.

At that point,(the a prompt) you will need to type "format c: /s /u " (without the quotes).

This will them format your c drive and install the system files on the c drive so that it will them be formatted and bootable.

Once acomplished, again boot from the bootdisk and install your OS (I assume here that the bootdisk has cd support to load your OS from the cd).

Good luck. Re-post and let us know how things are going.

[thommo]

thanks for everyone who replied.....

I've finally worked things out it's all fine!!!!

once again...THANKYOU EVERYONE!!!!


regards,
thommo