Need help on format hd

[ilovefishsticks]

I've been trying to format the hard drive on my laptop 4 a wile and now i'm sick of it. I do format c: and it says it will delete everything y or n i do y. then it says volume in use by other file and it must be dismounted first and would you like to force a dismount y or n. I do y then it says cant lock drive volume still in use. Ive done this in safe mode command prompt and my os is windows xp. Can someone tell me how to fix this?

Thnx for reading

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

You need to boot from your Windows disc in order to format your HD.

Please see my reply to the following post Here

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

 

[ilovefishsticks]

response

I know i need to boot from the windows disks and it dosnt work, nothing comes up when i start up the computer. Also the reason I am formating is because i need to put windows 98 back on my computer and get rid of xp. That's why i'm having such a hard time with this, It won't let you go from a new version of windows back to the old one. srry I didn't mention that b4.

thnx 4 tryin to help and mabe you can think of another way to fix this. thnx agen 4 reading.

 

[howard_hopkinso]

In that case you need to fdisk your HDD using a 98 boot floppy.

If you don`t have a 98 boot disk you can get on from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Regards Howard :grinthumb

 

[ilovefishsticks]

respond

I would try that too but I dont have a floppy drive for my laptop. Have any other ideas? thnx anyways.

 

[lordx]

If u still have a os in your comp and a cdwriter(if not ask a friend or something) burn a bootable disk ,doesn't matter what u put on the disk just make it bootable(u can use nero burning rom to do this),and boot your comp into dos with this disk.
After that:
fdisk /mbr
enter
format c:
enter
choose yes
Enjoy!
I hope this will help u
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