Having problems formatting

I need to format this hard drive and it wont work, it wont format at all....help! I think I also screwed up a different comp...I formatted the hard drive and it wont boot from the cd rom. It keeps saying ...has no operating system, please press f1 to go into reboot mode....and it keeps doing that. HELP! they were free...lol

 

Have you went into the bios and changed the boot order to cd rom first most comps go to the floppy first then the hard drive last cd rom. sorry had to edit

 

yeah i did that made the cd rom first...still doesnt boot from cd...it was windows 98...i want to go to win me...it keeps telling me to get the cd windows me upgrade,,, but i want to format the hard drive then reboot with win me...sorry had to edit....i can get to the a prompt...i tried what the sticky said to do

 

cannot remember for sure but win you iinstall win me doesn"t it give you the option to formatt

 

nope..it just keeps saying that you already have an operating system, use windows me upgrade

 

did you try putting the hard drive in another comp and as slave and try to formatt that way

 

Did you try formating with win98 cd?

 

havent tried that...sounds like work....lol....ok what about the computer that keeps telling me to reboot because it doesnt have an operating system? Have I screwed it up totally?

 

what did you change on it

 

treid that too...with both the boot diskette and the cdrom win 98 & win me disk it just wont reboot from cd...and i even i went into the setup and made the cd rom first boot.

 

the computer that wont install the winme and says no operating system is already formatted. we will call this one computer 2 ok so we dont get confused.

 

Does the bios detect the cd rom

 

on computer 1 i did change it to boot first from the cd rom and the cd rom drive light does go on.

 

what i mean is when you boot the computer up does it show in the screen along with the hard drive and ram info. It maybe the cdrom is not working properly check the cables on it and the power opps i saw you already check the power

 

actually i have the computer right now at the a prompt i type in format c: then it says bad command or file name so i am at that point right now

 

How is your partitions?
Try fdisk?

 

It would seem that you have a ME OEM CD. This means that it wont upgrade a previous OS and needs a clean hard drive in order to install. You will need a Win98 or ME boot disk to reformat your hard drive. Go to bootdisk.com and download either of the two. Both will be a WinImage executable file. After downloading, you will need a blank floppy to create the disk with. Put this in your A: drive, click on the file that you downloaded, and select A:. When this process is finished you will have a boot/system disk. Leave this in the A: drive and shut the computer down and restart. It should boot from the floppy in A: drive, load a bunch of files, and when finished stop at the A:> prompt. Type " format C:" without the quotation marks and hit enter. This will format your hard drive and you should be able to install ME from your CD. Hope this helps!

 

ok i will try that

 

i did fdisk...is this formatting? anyways now anything i type in doesnt work

 

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winme_install.asp

 

insert the win98 boot disk (again) choose option 2 then let it reboot. now go to fdisk, delete all partitions shown, then re-create a new partition using all available disk space. re-check it to make sure you have only 1 partition and that it reflects your actual disk hard disk size. (most likely NOT the actual size...ie: a 40 gig may show up as being 38,459)

once done, reboot (with the boot disk still in) choose option 2 again and when at the A:> prompt type in FORMAT C:..it should format your hard drive.

once done, reboot again, with the same disk, now choose option 1 (add cd rom support) let it install the cd rom virtual drivers (leave your win98 cd in the cd rom)...when the system is ready and back to your A:> prompt, type in SETUP or INSTALL.

your cd should begin installing win98.

 

im installing win me

 

hoo boy...are you gonna be sorry!! my advice is to stay away from ME at any costs!!

either install win98SE or winxp pro if you can.

PS: i use winxp pro, but i also use the win98 boot disk before any installation to use fdisk as i explained.

 

yeah very true..Win ME is even more unstable den WIN 98. I wus rather suggest goin for win XP Pro or win 98.