I`m having a problem with the hard drives on my desk top. I cannot get any operating sytem to install onto them, and my win 98 boot disk has gone they way of the dodo`s. Cannot get partition magic to run from cd or rescue disks. The windows me disk doesn`t have the format command( don`t know why, it has fdisk. One is no good without the other).

My main problem is the first partition on both disks has been formatted by windows xp using fat 32. I needed to do a gash install of xp to get the data of my girlfriends laptop drive after her laptop died. I`m trying to reinstall ME and can`t as it says the disks have been formatted using an NTFS system, So is there any utilities i can dump onto a boot floppy to help me out and get the drives formatted in none xp fat 32. After I frag the partition using FDISK.

I`m trying to install on the old laptop drive until I can rescue all my data. Then completly frag all the drives and Install xp properly.

Cheers Jase

 

You want a boot disk: http://www.bootdisk.com/

sometimes the obvious links are worth trying

 

I seem to recall on the Windows ME disk that all the good DOS commands were placed onto a seprate Directory on the CD, think it's called 'OLDMSDOS' it's on the root of the CD, as this was Microsofts mandate to eradicate 16 Bit backwards compatibiltiy from ME to stop instability problems (Okay you can stop laughing Now!). If you have a PC that boots up either ME or XP you can actually format a Floppy with the MS-DOS system files on it from 'My Computer'. Right click the Floppy Disk icon choose 'Format' and on there you can choose to make the floppy disk a bootable MS-DOS one.

 

Thanks for that thread it was a life saver.

Jase