I am trying to start fresh with an old laptop, it's a Compaq presario 333mhz. I went to clean it up and went to format the c: and the formating quit. All it did was hang up on sector 556,012 (or there abouts) and then 5-10 minutes later said that the formating had been terminated. I went on to try in this order. delpart - got rid of all partitions fdisk - recreate partition format c: (following fdisk instructions) format was terminated... Now I'm stuck.... Any ideas out there? pete

If you know the make of the HDD, go to the manufacturer's website & download their diagnostic software. You may also wanna try a different boot floppy (assuming that's what you're using) Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

Hi pete, Did you reboot after fdisk and before formay? M2

Check your Hard Drive,Sounds like bad sectors,this happens a lot and ppl dont realize it could be the HD,it may not be toast,bad sectors can be repaired most of the time.Good Luck.

If you don't find a diagnostic diskette you can write zeros to the hard drive and then fdisk and format the drive.This should help correct the problems with the bad sectors on the drive.Two programs that can be run if your laptop has a diskette drive from which to boot: Kill Disk Floppy from LSoft Technologies Inc. and diskzero from kzin.com.The first has a graphical interface and is bootable but the other can reach a second hard drive if you have one in the future.From a dos prompt type: diskzero 0 -z (press enter and follow on screen instructions;change 0 for 1 for second physical hard drive).Copy diskzero to the boot disk.Procedure is safe and many times does restore the hard drive to normal.This procedure can also be used for odd situation like boot sector virus,scandisk seems to block at some % without reason or you wish to erase the drive when you sell the computer(fdisk will never erase the hard drive completely). http://www.killdisk.com/ http://www.kzin.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?/utillc/diskzero Other programs exist like zip,zap,wipe,Paragon disk wiper(with GUI). Good luck.

I made a bootdisk that give you these options ECHO YOU HAVE THE FOLLOWING FIVE CHOICES. ECHO. ECHO 1)COMPLETE FORMAT HARD DRIVE (LOW LEVEL FORMAT) ECHO. ECHO 2)FDISK (NEED TO RUN AFTER LOW LEVEL FORMAT) ECHO. ECHO 3)FORMAT HARD DRIVE (NEED TO RUN AFTER FDISK) ECHO. ECHO 4)CLEAR THE BIOS PASSWORD (FOR PEOPLE THAT FORGOT ECHO BIOS PASSWORD AND NEED TO ACCESS THE BIOS) ECHO. ECHO 5)QUICK FORMAT THE HARD DRIVE AND INSTALL WINDOWS if you think this will help and you want it let me know..I have one for fat 16 and fat 32

For Jean - Thanks for the info on DISKZERO, I'll try it on my 10 gig that can't seem to take partition table entries ... You don't have to be realistic to be cynical, but you DO have to be cynical to be realistic!