for some reason i,m unable to format my c drive. I tried doing it by right clicking c drive + format, then with dos commands i.e format c; no luck. I desparetely have to format these drives, its a dell optilex pc. any one maybe can help me to unlock my hard drive so i can format cause now it's not allowing me. thank you in advance. simon

Hi, You cannot format the drive from within the operating system you currently are using. You'll have to either format it with a boot disk that will give you DOS prompts such as a 98 boot disc or by using a windows xp CD. Go to the 'howtos' section of this forum and it will explain it in detail. Tony AMD Athlonxp 3200+ OC Asus A7N8x-deluxe-E ATI AIW 9600pro 2x WD SATA raptors/raid0 Corsair XMS3200 16x Lite-on DVD 48x Lite-on CDRW Aspire Super Alien Case

If the drive was not FAT32 but NTFS (as I suspect it was), you can't use a DOS boot disk. As Tony says, you also can't do it from within Windows. I have heard of an XP boot disk(s)but I don't know what it/they is/are. I had a Win NT drive an that was NTFS. I cleaned that off by doing a low level format. I had the re-partition afterwards, then I could use a DOS boot disk and format C: as you expected. Free low level format prog..... www.killdisk.com (free version and one wipe is good enough).

It would help to know why you're formatting...whether your current format is FAT32 or NTFS...& what your plans are for the drive after formatting. Are you gonna use it for storage, & or are you gonna reinstall Windows? If you're gonna reinstall, what version of Windows (98, ME, 2000, XP?) If you're gonna install 2000 or XP, you boot off the CD & format from there...if you're gonna install 98 or ME, you'll need a boot floppy or the hard drive manufacturer's software Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

Doing a low level format can be dangerous it rewrites track and sector markings try to avoid that. I don't believe killdisk.com is a low level formatting program but it could be helpful. Either use a 9x bootable disk and use fdisk delete all partitions, repartition and format or you can use the 2000/XP bootable CD and do it from there.

In XP you can hit F5 while booting and chose boot to C prompt. You maybe could format the disk from there, but I am not sure. If you have another working PC you can hook the drive up as slave the right click on it in Explorer and format it from there. If it doesn't work the 1st time try again and again.... the 3rd time find the tallest building around stand near a large window with a view.... Take a deep breath.. and drop the PC to it's death. LOL

Pat is right. Low level format on an IDE disk is not to be recommended. Low level format is done by the manufacture when the disk comes of the assembly line. Most if not all of these so-called low level format utilities just put the disk back to a state it was in immediately after the manufacture has done a low level format. Low level format by the user goes back to Prue-IDE days when the user could do a low level format, primary to optimize sector interleave. Even on a 20 Mb disk, this process could take over an hour. This was necessary because on-board caches were non-existent. Data read from the disk went straight to main memory. This meant that when the disk read the first sector, by the time it had been processed and stored in memory, the read head had passed over the second sector and there was a pause for the disk to come round to the second sector. By staggering the sectors e.g.0,3,6,1,4,7,2,5, it meant the the next sector was under the disk head as soon as the disk was ready to read. The optimal interleave was determined by the speed of the computer. The faster the computer, the lower the interleave ratio. The above example is an interleave ratio of 1:3 My old Tandy 1000 had an interleave ratio of 1:5 With modern IDE disk with on board caches, sector interleave is not relevant and they are all set at 1:1 as a whole track will be read into the on-board cache in one go before anything leaves the disk. Because the disk controller is integral with the disk, manufactures can optimize their low level format to the controller. BTW, you cannot boot XP to a C: prompt. XP HAS NO DOS! That is why everything that is needed is n the CD. Stuart