Fdisk ?? how ??

[HATEWINDOWS]

sorry for the basic question, but how do you do a completely clean format of a hardrive,did it years ago...something about FDISK ?..instructions please, i have a corrupted W2K and want a fresh drive to put WINME on to.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Who makes the drive? You may be able to check their web site for a LLF utility. It also depends on if the partition is NTFS or Fat32. You should be able to just format the partition if it is Fat32 by: boot to a 98 Startup disk, start w/ CD Rom support, and at the A prompt type in format X: (or X being the drive letter you want to format)

<font color=green>"Your call will be answered by the next available Tech Support representative"</font color=green>

 

[ejsmith2]

There's a 50% chance 'fdisk' won't be able to delete the NTFS (non-fat) partition. I usually have to load win2k, and have it delete the partition, then load win98 on.

You'll type in 'fdisk', and select yes for large disk support. select option 4? 'delete partition'. If you have an extended partition, you'll have to delete 'logical disks in the extended partition' before it will let you kill the extended. Then hit escape back to the 'main' menu, select number 1 'create primary partition', and select the size after the friggin fdisk checks the 'validity' of the disk twice, which takes 5 minutes each run on a 45 gig drive.

I use partition of no greater than 10gig on fat32, and use the following format commands:
format c: /u/c/z:4 (for 2k clusters)
format c: /u/c/z:8 (for 4k clusters)

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Whats this mean "format c: /u/c/z:8"?

As far as I know formatting a drive isn't what determains the cluster size; It's the partition size that determains that? Correct?

Fdisk is able to delete a "Non-Dos" partition also. NTFS isn't supported under windows95, 98, or ME so you should be able to delete it from there .....

Let me know ....

<font color=green>"Your call will be answered by the next available Tech Support representative"</font color=green>

 

[Guest]

lol ur getting format, and fdisk mixed up
fdisk does not format the disk, it partions it so the you are able to set cluster size etc.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

See I knew that, ejsmith doesn't I don't think .... I was kinda hinting towards that in my post!

Thanks! *:O)

<font color=green>"Your call will be answered by the next available Tech Support representative"</font color=green>

 

[Guest]

There's also delpart.exe available from MS's site. Just copy it to a bootable disk. It will delete any kind of partition, no problem.

 

[ejsmith2]

The 'z:#' command?

It's the cluster size determiner, in 512b increments. I usually use 8, but if i'm doing a 1.5gig partition, I'll use 4 just to get all the files packed down.

1=512b clusters
2=1k clusters
4=2k clusters
8=4k clusters
16=8k clusters
32=16k cluster
etc.

just add the 'z:#' command to the end of the format command. When windows help (contradiction?!?) tells you it's not the 'optimal' clusters size, hit the 'run-off-someplace-and-die' key.

Fdisk lets you specify if you want fat32 or fat16 paritions. Format does the cluster sizes.