Can,t figure out how to formate HD

[rickrh72]

Hi
ME and my son built this computer, and we fired it up for the first time tonight. But I have a problem formating the HD. Every thing seams to be working so I went into the bios and set my first boot device to CD DVD rom. I put the Win. vista disk in the drive and didn't get a comand promt to format the HD. WIn started to load after I put in the licence code and then it asked for the HD drivers. I then put in the driver disk that I downloded from Western Digital and a window opend and scaned for drivers. I tried the Windows drivers and the DOS drivers and it didn't work. How do I get a comand prom to come up so I can format the HD? I have a WD Caviar SE 500gb HD, and a GigaByte GA-965P-DQ6 MOBO Rev. 3.3. I think I have aproblem with the system recognizing the HD. Any thoughs on this? I don't format HD's very often, so I do run into problems some times. Any thoughts or help on this will be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your Help. Have fun, Rick

 

[gwag]

drivers will not come from WD. I would think drivers would be included in XP but you may need to get them from Gigabyte and put them on a usb stick or floppy since Vista is asking you for them
? (that would be SATA drivers for vista)
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Moth...ProductID=2295&ProductName=GA-965P-DQ6
looks like the top 2 depending on 64 or 32 bit
link to 32 bit http://america.giga-byte.com/FileList/D...rver_raid_intel_ich8r_bootdisk_2.0.exe

 

[JonnyBlaze]

you dont get a command prompt to format anymore. it gets taken care of in the gui. when you picked what drive your installing to.

 

[Robor]

Vista should already have drivers for your controllers. When you select what drive to install to it will format it. I haven't done Vista in a while but I would imagine there's some advanced options that you could use to change the partition size or format type but default should do just fine.