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Formatting hard drive & install Win98

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mef930

mef930

MIS
Apr 30, 2003
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My hard drive died on me. I'm trying to reformat the c drive but i keep getting this message.

Format not supported on drive C:
Format terminated

Do anyone know what this means?
 
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Are you saying you're trying re-format the dead drive? Doesn't that tell you something?

...Mac

Humpty Dumpty was pushed!!
 
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Suspect that you have an error message because you are trying to format the ramdisk that is loaded from the boot disk.
The boot disk loads the ramdisk at the first assignable hard drive slot available.
And if this is truly the problem, you should see the drive assignment as the system is booting up. And it means that the hard drive doesn't have a valid partition that it can use as C:.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
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Run fdisk and see if the hard drive is even found, and if so what partitions are on it, if any. Or if you have Partition magic try that.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)
 
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Ok, I will try to check my bios. I did try to run fdisk. It says, "No fixed disks present".

What does that mean?
 
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It means that the BIOS didn't identify a hard drive.
Try getting into BIOS and have it auto ident your drive.
If it won't , you have a bad drive, cable, or something is not set correctly.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
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Your BIOS should allow you into CMOS setup. One of the choices in CMOS setup may be "identify hard drives", a selection put in to make it easier for users to set their machines up.
But it is also possible that you don't have that choice and would have to enter the parameters manually.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
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My award calls it "IDE HDD auto detection"

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
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