format.com does not work on my friend's computer?

[slicksilver]

Dunno what the problem is but when I try to format my friends hard disk it says " Divide Overflow error".......Well the thought of formatting came into my mind coz. my friend's system was not booting up........He had win2k(fresh copy) installed a few days ago and he said the computer refused to boot after two days of using it.......earlier when I tried the format command some months ago on his system it worked ........but now it doesn't......has the hard disk gone bad or is there something I am doing wrong?

Raj

 

[airfoil]

Is the file system NTFS? Are you booting from floppy/CD & then trying to perform the format? Are you trying to format the drive from which has format.com on it?

 

[slicksilver]

Airfoil: The partition is FAT32. I aint that dumb to format a disk which has format.com file on it

I have tried booting from both floppy and cd. The floppy was a msdos v.622 disk and the bootcd is a win98 image......I get the same error with both the format.com files......any other suggestions?

Raj

 

[Supergax]

low level format

 

[PC Freak]

fdisk /mbr

delete and recreate your partition
then format. should be good to go