hard drive troubles and need help

[GroundZero3]

okay i have a 1.3 gb hard drive and i can't get it to format!! i go into Fdisk and delete and create the partition and it sayz i need to restart and then format the hard drive. So i restart, the Dos prompt comes up and i type up to get the c prompt and then i type format and it says Invaild media type drive C and the it asks abort, fail, retry. Some one please help me i can't seem to get it working!!
am i typing in the wrong thing?? if so help me out. or any information would be great.
Thanxs
GZ3

[emcron]

I just recently did the same thing. What I did is boot with a cd-rom or you could just use a floppy. Then type format c: from the "a:" prompt or the cd-rom prompt.

[Mattyb]

Do you know the Brand of your harddrive? Most makers have a program you can download and unzip onto a 3 1/2 disk that would boot from floppy when you start your computer. The program will allow you to format and partition your drive. For instance maxtor has Maxblast, Western digital uses ezdrive. Both programs will format, partition, and load sytem files onto harddrive. You need a startup disk before you do either programs to load sytem files from. Also if drive is your master you will need a bootdisk with cdrom support to then load Operating System. Good Luck

Mattyb

[RomVilla]

Well, it happened to me too when I reinstalled Windows 98 2nd Edition. The install disk that came with it does not have FORMAT.EXE file. I have to used Windows 95 startup disk to format the hard drive. So, perhaps you have to check your diskette if you got this file.

[sns]

I came across 3 new drives at work that I had placed with some new very small m/boards that kept coming up with an i/o error but were ok with other h/drives (same brand & size). I tried win95 and win98 bootdisk (that had been ok previously for new drives) but error kept coming up. Out of desperation with the boss eyeballing me I grabbed the dos6.22 disks and placed the first disk in the floppy and rebooted - it formatted with no errors (it was incorrect size because I think they were 4gb drives) from there I was able to fdisk and format using the win98 disk for the correct size and the error never came up again on the 3 systems. It only ever happened on those 3 h/drives and m/boards. Anyway hopefully the ideas above this will solve your problem before things get desperate.