I have a velociraptor hard drive and i need to reformat it

[Guest]

i have a velociraptor hard drive and i need to reformat it to bootable. the western digital utilities disc takes me to a doss prompt like, A:\>

i'm not very doss literate. how do i continue from there. i need it in text form or walked thru it.

 

[Paperdoc]

"the western digital utilities disc takes me to a doss prompt like, A:\>", you say. My guess is that you are using a floppy disk containing WD's utility Data Lifeguard. That's the wrong disk.

Just to be clear, you do not merely need to "reformat" the drive to make it bootable. To make a HDD bootable it needs to have its Partition Table changed, and the easiest way to do that is to Delete all Partitions and then Create a new Primary Partition that is bootable and format it. Then you will have to Install an OS on it, right? Now, if that's what you want, it just got easier. Just to be sure, though, you do understand that this process will destroy ALL the data on the disk, right? You already have everything you need backed up somewhere else?

Any Windows Install CD can and will Partition a new drive and Format it for you before it actually starts the Install process. Additionally, at the very beginning of the Install process you will have a menu option to Delete any Partition already on the HDD. Do that, and you will have a completely blank HDD to start with. You will NOT have to manually Delete, Create and Format a Partition with some other utility package before the Install process.