formating hard drive

I need to know how to reformat my hard drive without an ms-dos startup disk disk.

 

I am not sure if I understand what you are trying to accomplish. Please provide more detail on that so we can give you more accurate answers.
I am guessing you do not have a floppy drive and want to be able to install the Operating System in question via CD-ROM drive? If so, as long as the BIOS has CD-ROM drive option available and the OS CD is bootable (Suse, RedHat, Windows 2000Pro, XP Pro, etc.) then simply trying booting to that CD. All the OSes I mentioned above have their own format/fdisk utility.

...to be continued...

 

You'll need to be able to boot from some drive or another. You'll need to boot into some OS or another -- your system is just an expensive doorstop if you don't have a boot disk of some kind.

Any drive that your system can boot from will do, whether it's a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive, or another hard drive. Any OS will do, whether it's MS-DOS, some flavour of Linux or Unix, or some version of Windows.

If you're re-formatting a secondary hard drive (one that you don't boot from), you won't need a boot disk unless something goes seriously wrong and you find yourself unable to boot from your primary hard drive.

(That's why boot floppies used to be known as "panic disks". If you couldn't start from your hard drive, you had two choices: find a boot disk or panic.)

If you're re-formatting the drive that contains your operating system, you'll need to be able to start your computer from another drive that can load an OS that is compatible with the OS that you want to (re-)install. If you're re-formatting so that you can do a clean install of WinXP, you need to be able to boot into an OS that will allow you to re-format your hard drive with the filesystem you want.

If you're content with a FAT32 filesystem, a Win98 startup diskette may be the easiest way to go. It needs only a single 3 1/2" floppy and includes the tools you need to re-partition and re-format a hard drive under 64GB in size. If you want to use NTFS, you'll probably have to go the CD-ROM route and boot into a later version of Windows to do the re-format and re-install.

The short answer is that you need a boot disk of some kind. As Turcoloco said: what do you want to do? That will determine what boot disk you need and how to use it.

 

theres many progs out there to format harddrive but you would need a boot disk most likely if you wanted to do anything with the harddrive afterwards.

 

If you are running XP and only have one HD you will not be able to format it without using a bootable XP CD. If it is a second HD then click My computer, right click the drive you want to format then from the drop down box left click on format
Regards
SHL