Hi,
I have a dell pc on loan and want to format the hard drive before I give it back. I don't have any discs (being on loan and what not). Its running Windows XP. I've tried running a boot disk but it won't accept any comands.
Please help
Hi,
I have a dell pc on loan and want to format the hard drive before I give it back. I don't have any discs (being on loan and what not). Its running Windows XP. I've tried running a boot disk but it won't accept any comands.
Please help
First of all, you'll need to create a boot floppy. Here's how you create one:
Now that you've done that, you can boot off the floppy disk that you created. Make sure it's still in the drive, and reboot the computer.
Once you've booted with the floppy, you'll reach the command prompt. There is a Format command on the floppy, but I doubt that will work because usually, Windows XP uses the NTFS filesystem which Format doesn't support. To get around this, you'll need to use Fdisk to delete the partition:
FDISK
and press return.There's probably no more partitions on your hard drive, which is hopefully what you want, as the DOS tools contained on the diskette can't recreate NTFS partitions, although the Windows XP installation disk is perfectly capabe of doing that.
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