formatting hassles - to put it mildly

[Laurie]

Hi everyone - I am new to this site (looks awesome though) and am a computer user and thats about it. My PC is extremly slow and only 580megs left on an 8gig c drive (i have a 40 gig slave attached) so I decided to format c drive to erase rubbish and start again. I have an xp pro os. I put in a 98 floppy boot disk and by using fdisk deleted drive c partition then reinstalled partition as one large drive then rebooted and attempted to format c: when bad command or file name came up I tried C: at A prompt and then tried format C: to which I got invalid media type reading drive C
Please help - I'm going mad!!!!!
Thanks

 

[WIPp]

It's been a while since I had to format anything.. was that the actual command you typed ?

so it looked like

C:/format c

From memory I think it needs to be something like:

C:\ format c:\

or C:\format c:


But it's been a while so I could be wrong.

Have you checked to make sure that your system is capable of running XP Pro minimum requirements ?

 

[WIPp]

as an afterthought... win xp should give you a format option when you throw the disk in to install

 

[Laurie]

Hey thanks for your answer - I've been running xp pro for a couple of years now with no worries - I have the xp os cd but am trying to boot from a 98 floppy and then install xp once I have an os on at a:\> I type format c: I have tried format c:/s and format c: /u /s etc etc but it just says bad command etc at C:\> i type fromat c: and it say invalid media type etc ????!!

 

[Peddant]

In my opinion you should install xp on the 40GB and use the 8GB for backup.You`ll need to make it the master(40GB that is)There are many well written guides to formatting and installing,on the net- http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1778&page=2 - http://www.theeldergeek.com/clean_installation_of_windows_xp.htm It would be better to use them,rather than get piecemeal advice here.And welcome to techspot.