HD format problem

[Flufster]

Hi Guys. Its great to be a new member.

I have a problem formating a HD that I got from a friend. He was using it as a backup drive on his Windows XP Pro unit.

I am running Windows ME ( the best my old PC can handle).

I've run 'fdisk' on the HD, set it as active, and then tried to format. Windows returns with "incorrect MS-DOS version".

I don't get it. What do I need to do to get this formatted, and if possible can someone explain why it's not formatting.

Thankyou for any help.

 

[PC eye]

You are trying to go from an NTFS partition to a FAT32 is the first thing to throw your way. But the first thing to direct your attention to is trying to run FDISK on the drive itself. "GOOBER ALERT"! If you have either an ME or even 98 startup floppy onhand boot from that and then try running FDISK! If the floppy fails to see results either prepare another or borrow the XP installation disk off of your friend to wipe the current partition.
You can do that easily when first running the XP installer. When asked if the installation will go onto the detected partition the "L" key at that time is pressed to enter the delete option followed by pressing "D" for delete. The drive's partition and all else will be deleted at that time. Once that has been done boot from either a 98 or ME startup disk to run FDISK to create a new primary partition.

Format.com is the file where you can then enter "format /s" to format the drive in FAT32. The ME installation cd can then be booted from by changing the boot order in the bios to have setup start automatically. If you never been there simply type setup or setup.exe at the dos prompt making sure the ME cd is in the drive to start the installation.