Formatting Problem

[Balrog39]

I've been wanting to reformat my hard disk and reinstall windows on it, seeing as how it's been almost a year since i've installed winxp over win98.

However, I encountered a problem as I was trying to do so. I made a startup floppy disk, rebooted my pc and typed "format c:" in the dos screen, only to get an error saying that it was an invalid drive name .

I think I might have an idea why it's doing this, because with my motherboard, in order to boot from a floppy disk i have to disable the hard drive as a boot device in the BIOS. Then, because I disabled it, it doesnt recognize it when i try to reformat it.. could this be possible?

Now, I remember that in win98 there was an option when you shut down to "quit to dos", thereby eliminating the necessity for me to disable the hard disk as a boot device and use a start up floppy disk in order to access dos. Does anyone know if there is something like a "quit to dos" option in win xp?

Or, if not, would anyone have another solution to my problem?

Thanks in advance

[Rizindon]

if u trying to install xp boot it from the cd itll give u the option to fromat ur harddrive itself

[Virtualbody1234]

You cannot format from DOS because you probably have an NTFS partition. DOS and NTFS aren't compatible.

Just boot the Windows XP CD and there are tools to partition and format right there.

[Global Media Trader]

There are many free formating programs that install to a floppy. MaxBlast is one , made by Maxtor, there are many more you can find in download.com.

They are so easy to use, they are made for idiots. just put the floppy in and reboot. it gets the disk ready for a operating system and tells you exactly what to do