I'm trying to clean up a Windows 95, P166 PC to donate to a charitable organization and I'm having trouble trying to re-format the hard drive to clean off my old software and files. When I power up with the boot disk, DOS won't recognize the C drive (or any other drive than A). If I try FORMAT or FDISK or even simply try to read the C:\ directory, I get the error that the drive is not valid. Can anyone tell me what else I can do to get the hard drive to be recognized or format it in another way? I could run the FORMAT command from a DOS window after loading Windows but I am concerned about what that would do. Is this an option? Thanks!

How big is the disk? It sounds like some type of disk manager is installed for large disk support, and the boot disk bypasses this.

For example, Western Digital comes with the OnTrack disk, did you have to install a disk to make the drive work originally?

The disk is 2.1 GB EIDE. It's the one that was originally supplied by Micron when I bought the PC and I never had to install any drivers. I don't have any extra support software for it. I don't know the manufacturer of the drive. Any ideas?

sounds to me like you're booting off of a DOS 6.22 bootdisk rather than the version of DOS that belongs to your system, maybe?

- W0rm
- http://jason-n3xt.org/dos

i might be wrong, so don't trust me on it. What version of fat did you original format it in, cause if your using dos (fat 16) it won't see fat 32. you will have to boot with a win 9x or more disk.

If the above assumptions about your problem are correct and you can boot to Windows 95, what you need to do is to create a stratup disk by going START>Settings>Control Panel>Add Remove Programs and select create startup disk. When you get the startup disk use it to format the drive. Or to make it really convenient for the next user, remove all the logical drives and partitions and create two fat 16 partitions on the drive.