Reformatting Problems... please help

I am having problems reformatting my hard drive. A virus seems to have destroyed everything, so I am trying to refornat, reinstall everything and start over. I have tried to use the Dell support people, but they have proved (after 5 hours on the phone with them) to be completely unable to help.

In trying to reformat the hard drive, I delete and create a primary Dos partition. Sometimes I cannot delete the Dos partition because there is an "unrecognizable Volume Label" -- it lists the volume label as jibberish. Once I reboot, however, there is no listed volume lable and I can delete the dos partition without problems.

I then reboot and try to format from the operating systems cd. It starts to format, but then gives an error message"

"Windows Me cannot be installed on your computer. There was an error in your primary dos partition."

I have tried deleting and recreating the dos partition again, with no luck.

I have run diagnostic tests on the hard drive which pass.

Does anyone know what is going on here???
I am very frustrated and am ready to toss the thing out the window...

 

Sounds like you have an unrecognised partition.... did you have windows XP / Windows NT or Windows 2000 installed on the machine before?

You need to use FDisk and delete all the partitions, including any non-dos partitions. You can download dos6 or dos 6.22 boot disks from www.bootdisk.com and create a disk with Fdisk and format on it.

I would use Fdisk remove all partitions and then create a new primary dos partition. Format this using the dos format.

Note : if you want a larger partition then 2Gb then you will need to use the Windows 98 boot disks.

If this fails then look for a utility to low level format your hard drive. Maxtor have one on their website but it is specific for Maxtor disks so may not work on other manufacturers drive.

KCL