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Is there a dos command or other way to find out what the HD is named. For some reason mine is not c:.
thanks
Well, you are gonna have to tell us some more, because so far as I know, if you have a legit, installed, bootable, working, etc, etc, DOS system, it HAS to be C:
Are you trying to install a system on a blank hdd?
You can't get format or fdisk to "recognize" the drive?
Tell us some more
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Fdisk recognizes a drive installed. However when I start up from the boot disk and try "format c:" it says invalid drive. I tried every other letter and b:, r:, and s: work. B: is the zip drive and r: and s: are network drives. Any ideas?
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Hi,
I have no idea what you're doing.
You original said you OS is XP.
Now you're talking about fdisk and format.
If you can't format this drive, how are you seeing network drives?
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Ok heres the long story. I don't know the password for my machine but I want to reformat the HD. XP pro is installed currently. When I boot from the XP cd and try to do a clean install it asks for the administrator password, which I don't know. So I tried using a boot disk, booting into dos, and running the format command. When I run "format r:" or "format s:" it says "cant format a network drive." (I found out there were r and s drives by typing every letter in). In addition typing "format c:" brings up an "invalid drive" message. So I am guessing the drive is named something else. I need to know what it is named. Any ideas?
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This has bugger all to do with DOS, you have an NT Operating System on an NTFS5 formattted hard drive. If you are intent on using MSDOS FDISK then you need to remove all non-dos partitions:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;255867
Also you can remove/format partititions during an install of XP wether or not you already have an O/S installed, that is if you understand what you need to do..........to achieve this
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""When I boot from the XP cd and try to do a clean install it asks for the administrator password,""
I haven't played with XP enough, and you should be over there in that forum.However, I've fiddled with some old systems with passwords on them, including Linux/Unix/Xenix/CPM, and I've always been able to remove partitions and rework a hard drive WITHOUT knowing any administrator password.
I don't remember what girations X tra P utrid goes through when you boot the CD, are you
a sure the thing IS booting from the cd,
and not the hard drive?b did you get to the selection where X tra P utrid lets you remove partitions and format?
Last, you don't have, say, something like an IBM Thinkpad, with a hard drive password?
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Hi Decker.
If you have a good XP installed and simply lost the password, download the utility to clear out the password.
If the XP installation is trashed, boot on 98se and use fdisk to remove all non-DOS partitions.
Like name, I have not been through all them gyrations, but it sounds like you're booting on the HD. HINT: The XP CD cannot know your password.
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response #5 above is correct... dos ignores ntfs formatted harddrives. you'll need to use fdisk to remove the partition first... then, create a fat32 partition... then dos can format that. Doesn't matter that you format as fat32, when you reinstall XP, you have the option of reformatting the harddrive back to ntfs, so, just removing all partitions should be enough for the XP cd bootup to work with
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If you do not want any of the info on the hdd, in order to bypass the password, suggest a low level format which will totally wipe the disk.
Then FDISK and FORMAT.
Good luck - Keep us posted.
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