What is the dos command to reformat a hard drive? Also , how do you load the driver for a cd rom from a floppy to the hard drive after reformating. (The computer does not have the drivers for the cd rom drive, have to down load them)

Wel I don't know about the CD thing. But to format from DOS you type format c: But becareful, formatting erases DOS and anything else on your computer, it could be hard to get it back.

You neglected to state if your O/S is Windows 95,98,98SE, etc. If you are not running 98, you might want to find out who manufactured your CD, and download the correct driver to a floppy disk. However if you are running W/98, make a startup disk, you will need it later. Then after formating, you can reload windows, without the need of the driver. Remember this does not necessarily work with W/95. As far as formating, you type the following, at the C>(prompt in DOS Mode). It should look something like this. C> format /s There is a space between the C prompt, and the word format /s. This means you will be formating the drive, but will still have system files. After doing this, if you are running Windows 98, stick in the start uop disk, and you will be prompted for a selection of how you want to load windows. Choose by CD Rom. The system will load the needed files off your floppy, and then you cna put the Windows 98 CD in, change the Directory to D:(by typing such, of whatever your CD Rom Drive is), and type the word setup. If you are going to install W/95, I suggest you get a copy of your CD Rom Driver before formating. After formating, you will need to load MSCD. Exe which will be on your start up disk, and Himem.sys to your C: Drive before you can load the CD Rom Driver. After CD Driver is loaded, change the directory to D:(or your CD Rom Directory), and type Setup. Hit Enter, and your on your way back to a clean install of Windows. Good Luck

format C: or if you want to make the disk bootable format C: /s this copies the system files over to the boot sector to allow the disk to be recognised as a bootable disk. The cd rom drivers should be put on the startup disk along with a copy of msdex or alternatively get windows 98 to create a startup disk for you. Any problems with that email me on charles.dikkens@virgin.net and i can send you a boot disk down the line as an attachment.

After you have a valid partition on your drive (you can check in fdisk), reboot your machine with a boot disk. From the DOS prompt type "format c: /s" without the quotation marks. The /s is only necessary if you want to transfer the sytem files so the drive will be bootable after the format. If you have the floppy that has the cd-rom drivers on it, it probably has a setup program on it. From the a drive DOS prompt type dir this will list everything on the floppy. Look for a file with a .exe extension that says something like setup or setupcd or setupd then run that file by typing the name at the prompt and press enter. Then just follow the program prompts..

What OS? I'm assuming Win95 or 98. Make a startup disk first! If you are using win98 your startup disk will contain generic drivers for the cdrom that will hopefully work with your cdrom. Test it first. If you are using win95 you will need to add the drivers to the disk and edit autoexec.bat and config.sys (on the floppy) to have access to the cdrom for reloading. Make sure that your startup disk works properly and that you have access to your cdrom from it before you continue. Also make sure to save all your important data. When you are sure you are ready to continue, pop the startup disk into the a: drive, reboot to it, and type format C: (assuming that the drive you want to format is C:) If this is your only hard drive you may want to consider running fdisk first to repartition the drive into at least two partitions. One for data, one for the OS. Just a thought. This site has alot of good info, you may want to do a bit of searching here to better acquaint youself with the whole process. As for the cdrom drivers. If windows doesn't have the proper drivers you will have to load them by hand by saving them to disk and pointing windows to them via device manager.

Sorry I did not give enought info, here's the kicker: Like a dumba**, I deleted the dos partitions and rebuilt them and was getting ready to try to format w/ a disk based program, but it required more Ram than was on this old POS has. Now all it says on start up is "no operating system" and there is no dos prompt. If I download a startup disk from the net will it help?