I am trying to fix up an old Acer laptop (350) for my son. I fdisked the HD and now I cannot format the HD, It starts ok but hangs up at either 16% or 26%. I have a ton of boot disks. This oldie doesn't have a CD drive. Plaese help

http://www.killdisk.com The above wipes the hard drive, if you are using MS-DOS 6.22, my preferred choice with W3.x, when you boot from DISk1, it should offer to 'setup' the hard drive. Also good reading is: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;255867

Is there a possibility the hdd is large and this is causing your problem? What is the capacity of the hdd? I would also look at how you set up the partition(s) with fdisk. Good Luck - Keep us posted.

It is only a small HD, 800mb. I believe that I partitioned it into 1 partition. Itried the killdisk, and it stopped at 16% as well??? If I do need a new HD...Where could I get an old, small one

There is a very nice tool available from Hitachi (www.hgst.com) named Drive Fitness Test that you can freely download. I've been using it for months on many different HD, not necessarily of IBM/HITACHI brand. There are several files downloadable, among which one allows you to create a bootable floppy that you can use in turn to check hard disks. On older drives, the test features will be limited (no SMART), but at least should you be able to check the surface. This tool operates at very low level, and does not require the target HD to be formatted nor partitionned. Good Luck...

You can also take a disk from Laptop and put it on machine with CD or USB-flash for boot and install your OS. rape moviesMr.Gordon BE

I forget the exact sizes, but on old computers, there were two factors that caused problems such that the full capacity of a hdd could not be 'seen'. a) fat32 had to be used instead of fat16 - think when capacity > 2gb b) bios limit - this is overcome by downloading the drive manager program from the hdd maker's website. I think (b) may be the answer to the problem. Good Luck - Keep us posted.