gamerman4

I know i should prolly already know this but does anyone know of any free progs that allows me to format a hard drive from a bootable floppy disk? I am formatting a lot of computers and would like a short and sweet way of doing it.

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there shouldn't be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

The_Other_One

Windows has a format utility that works quite well for slave drives. Any reason that wouldn't work? Or even Windows Setup...

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gamerman4

Because There are about 25 comps, many with more than 1 HDD, that I need to format. I'm not gonna take each HDD out to format them. I would like something that goes straight to a format screen so I can select the drive and format it. Killdisk works but the fastest thing it does it do a single pass of zeroing the drive out which takes a while.

__________________
Intel Q6600 @ 3.00 Ghz
Xigmatek HDT-S1283
ASUS P5Q SE PLUS
HDDs:1 x 500GB 1x 750GB 1x 1000GB
2 x 2GB OCZ DDR2 1066
ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB
PC Power & Cooling S61EPS 610W
Logitech Z-5500
there shouldn't be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

StrangleHold

Or-http://www.bootdisk.com/

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SirKenin

Well, you can write a little batch file I guess.... Make sure you have the "CHOICE" command included on the floppy. Copy and paste the following text into notepad:

:: Format disk of your choice
::
Echo.
Echo.
Echo Which drive would you like to format?
Echo.
Echo ( C )
Echo.
Echo ( D )
Echo.
Echo ( E )
Echo.
Echo ( F )

A:CHOICE /C:CDEF /F > NUL

IF ERROR LEVEL 4 FORMAT F: /Q
IF ERROR LEVEL 3 FORMAT E: /Q
IF ERROR LEVEL 2 FORMAT D: /Q
IF ERROR LEVEL 1 FORMAT C: /Q

:END



Save it as for.bat and either execute it manually in each computer or put it into your autoexec.bat file to automatically execute.

tlarkin

Get partition magic, you can boot from it, and create a partition and format it in many different file systems.

If this is for a deployment, why not make a master image of your OS, then use imaging software to deploy your image across the network?

gamerman4

Well I just found a Windows 2000 Install CD somewhere which is quite convenient since thats what we were gonna put on them afterwards anyways so I am just gonna use that to do the format. I would network them and Ghost them all to eb the same but basically they are the "junk pile" of comps at our school so they arent aoll the same, just the ones that got replaced by something better. It is part of a project that my Comp Lab is doing. We are renting out comnputers on a per semester period where the less fortunate of the students can have a computer for internet and stuff like that. These are all slow and crappy since they were gonna be junk anyways so we figured we'd make something useful out of them.

__________________
Intel Q6600 @ 3.00 Ghz
Xigmatek HDT-S1283
ASUS P5Q SE PLUS
HDDs:1 x 500GB 1x 750GB 1x 1000GB
2 x 2GB OCZ DDR2 1066
ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB
PC Power & Cooling S61EPS 610W
Logitech Z-5500
there shouldn't be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?