Reformat

Allright, to make an extreamly long story short, I need to reformat my hard drive but I can't use any kind of windows set up disk. The drive currently has windows 2000 on it. Does anybody know how to completly wipe a computer without any kind of windows set up disk.

 

Are you able to use a boot disk of any kind (floppy or CD)?
If you will not be installing any other Os on it then use a bootable floppy disk/CD then using the GDISK free utility you could wipe out the partition info on the drive. Let me know if you need a copy of this cool utility. It delete all partition types with a single command.

 

I can use a boot disk of any kind. The problems only start once the OS tries to load. If you could get the program to me i could burn it onto a CD and then use that as a boot CD on the computer that isn't working. Thanks for all your help.

 

I have stored that file (zipped along with a few other cool utilities on my amateur web site. If you have a pop-up blocker or using Firefox type browser, then you can download GDISK from this link.

Good Luck.

After booting to the command prompt, whatever the drive letter is use this command to wipe the partition table quickly:
X:\dumpit (.exe) --> assuming the contents of the zip file were decompressed directly on to the root of the disc, but I normally keep them in a folder called GDISK so the command would be:
X:\GDISK\dumpit (.exe not used)

 

I put it on a floppy disk and when i went to boot up the computer that need reformatting. It tryed to boot from the disk since I have my BIOS set to look in the floppy drive first. All i got was "Non-system disk..."? Did i do something wrong. I think i misunderstood what to do. What do you mean by booting to the command prompt? Could u possible just walk me through what i'm supposed to do step-by-step. I would very much appreciate it. Thanks.

 

I am sorry if I forgot to mention GDISK is not bootable even when unzipped directly onto a disk...on the same site there is another download to create a bootable disk (or you could use any Win9x/ME boot disk, even in XP you could create one but it would be without CD-ROM support, just plain command prompt access, how you do this? Put a blank floppy in A drive, open My Computer, right-click on A drive, there you will see the option).
Good Luck and let me know if you have any other questions.

 

Allright, walk me through this. How do i creat a boot disk (using a floppy disk) that has this GDisk thing on it. (By the way, the computer i am trying to reformat is using windows 2000, which i have the boot CD disk for.)

 

I put that boot program from your website on the disk and it still gives me "Non-System Disk"

 

Ok, let's start from scratch the boot files you downloaded should be unzipped directly on the root of the floppy disk, not in a folder, ok?
Second thing, make sure in the BIOS the 1st boot device shows Floopy/A drive....if you are using a bootable CD then the first drive should be the CD-ROM on the list...

 

Problem. For some reason when i extract the files it will not put the file "Comman" on the disk. Its like its not even there. Yet when i wipe the disk and then try to extract the files again to the floppy disk it says "Would you like to overwrite the file "Command" even though command isn't even there. Should i just format the disk as an ms dos startup disk?

 

goto bootdisk.com or get this http://1gighost.net/boot2000/boot98c.exe
makes a 98boot disk.
boot up
fdisk /mbr
run fdisk - display part info - delete all parts
create a primary dos part.
reboot
format

 

I would do that, except I already got it to wipe my hard drive. I just created a boot disk on my XP computer (the one i'm using right now as I type this) and extracted the GDISK stuff the to the root directory in the floppy disk. I then inserted the floopy disk and typed dumpit and I wiped the hard drive. Thank you so much for all your help Turcoloc and you too FooGoo. God Bless and Happy Holidays.

 

Sorry I was out trying to finish my Xmas shopping, anyhow I am glad you got the GDISK to work and wipe out your drive. As you get more familiar with the command prompt and DOS environment in general all this will make more sense....to answer your earlier question about the command.com not being visible because it is a system file and by default its attribute is hidden! If your folder options > View settings did not have the 'Show hidden files and folders' selected, you would not be able to see it.

Happy holidays to you too!

 

I thought it was hidden. But that still doesn't explain why it wouldn't work as a boot disk. Whats the deal.

 

Not sure, without seeing what you did, the only thing I can think of is a problem with the media or the version of command.com (mismatch). I personally never had such problem, genenrally Win98 or ME startup disks work just fine... you could even delete the NTFS partition if under option 4 (display current partition info) the NTFS partition show up as NON-DOS Extended ...anyhow, you got the problem fixed so going forward create a working startup disk and keep it handy along with the GDISK to make wiping partitions process a breeze...
Cheers.