Formatting a Hard disc drive in DOS

Hi


what i would like to know

how do i

get to the dos prompt after the bios and how do i then format the drive

the bios is detecting the drive


I have 2 drives one has windows xp working perfectly but when i connect the other drive it halts

on the windows xp loading screen


the faulty drive has had a version of windows xp which maybe causing the problem

i have tried messing around with master slave etc


even disconnecting all drives apart from this one to see if i can get a fresh install

but what happens when i try to install windows - CD bbots up goes through the listing screen with black background then i get a whit line at bottom of screen and it just halts.



so i thought if i can format the drive in dos then that might certainly cure



please can anyone help me


cheers

 

Hi what you need to do is get rid of everything on the drive.. The easiest way to do this is to unplug the other drive, boot the pc from a windows 98 boot floppy and run Fdisk to remove the partition..

Then reboot from your xp cd, make a new partition and format the drive ntfs..don't install xp, it will just cause confusion..

Then put your main drive back in and the other drive should be there..

 

When you are plugging it in, it is obviously taking the priority over the existing drive and making it the main boot drive.
You will see this under boot device, as the new drive will be listed instead of the good one.

You need to go into the BIOS and set the corrupt drive and the secondary drive in the HDDs list under boot options.

Then under boot device the good hard drive will be listed as the hdd the pc will boot from, not the newly added one.

Then when you boot the second drive can just be formatted etc.. from XP.

 

to get to the dos prompt
start the computer, when windows starts to load pull the plug out.
start the computer, it will give start options one will be dos prompt

thats the question answered lol
but the unasked question everyone answered is how they said .
if you don't have a 98 boot disc...
use manage from the disc which works
start right click my computer, select manage, select disc management, right click on bad disc, select delete partition
then create partition and format

 

I also wouldn't recommend just unplugging the power cord whilst the system is switched on.
You are likely to cause damage sooner or later by doing that.

 

strange i use xp pro and i have a dos prompt
with or without networking
sorry reread your post
thats why pull the plug out
so that windows offers safe mode, not you selecting it with f8