Hard drive format issues

[Lothar1974]

Just curious, but has anyone ever tried to Fdisk and then format a hard drive and keep getting an error that c: is not a vaild or that format is not an option? I had 2 hard drives in a row(maxtor 20 Gig & western digital 20 Gig) that would Fdisk just fine and when I was ato the point of formatting the hard drive it gave messages that c: was not valid or format was not valid. The only way I could get them done was by using the utlities that provide.

Later!

 

[John]

What type of bootdisk are you using to fdisk/format? What o/s?

 

[Pex]

Try doing it from a Windows Xp cd boot menu.

 

[John]

Did you try both quick and regular format during the XP setup?

You can also use a Win98/ME bootdisk to format and partition the drives.

 

[Lothar1974]

I was trying to put Win 98 on the hard drive and tried several different 98 boot disks (each on a new floppy and from scratch), I download several times from Microsoft and other places to create boot disks. I could fdisk the drive just fine but everytime I tried to format them I ran into errors. When tryig with the Win 98 disk it stated there was and error and could not format the drive it suggested to run scan disk. When doing so it never found any errors but still wouldn't format. I used the Maxtor utility off their web site(can't remeber the name of it off hand) and the utility off of Western digitals site. They both ran and detected no errors and partitioned and formated they drive with out an issue. I have formated many hard disk in my day and never ran into this kind of issue. I was wondering if anyone else has seen this as well. Thanks for all the help every one!!