Format not suported on drive C:?

[Trifid]

I have installed a new hard drive for a friend (samsung spinpoint, ide)


Xp can not be loaded from dos, so I got 98se, copied the needed files, but when I enter xp setup it says that a harddisk volume with atleast 369mb.....

I cant format the harddrive in dos by "format c:" as it cancles it as soon as I press enter, and says "Format not suported on drive C"

What should I do now? Is it the harddrive damaged?

edit: I have used a different hardrive, and it says the same thing, could it be the pc?

 

[ShadowFalls]

if the partition is NTFS, DOS won't be able to handle it as it has no native support for NTFS partitions

 

[Trifid]

errr, I took it to my house, and formatted it in my pc in NTFS, as it wsn't formated. I have to go out later, so I left it for him to put xp on it, will he be able to instal xp in dos?

 

[SHAWN]

Why didnt you boot off the CD and format during the install?

 

[Trifid]

It is an old pc and couldn't boot from D. It needed a startup disk (luckily I had one) and windows 98 to transfer some old files.

It also wouldn't let me change it in the bios, as it was set to a,c with no other options to change it, to let it be D.

When I got to windows setup, it just said that there was no space on the harddrisk, press F3 to exit. It didn't get that far.

 

[SHAWN]

edit: disreguard. i didnt read the last part of your post.
how big is this hard drive? is it recognized in the bios?


remove the hard drive and put it into another machine. Boot into windows and let it recognize the new drive. Insert the XP CD and explore it. Copy the entire i386 folder to the root of the hard drive that you just installed. Assume it as drive f:. Copy the contents of the i386 to F:\I386. Return hard drive into old machine. boot to dos and change directory to the i386 folder. (which you just copied everything to.) Then type setup or setup32 I cant remember and the installation should start up.

 

[Trifid]

Its setup. I will do that tomorow, thanks.

 

[Trifid]

I think it is a 80gb. I don't know if it is recognised by the bios, as it says, master harddrive not recognised, and below that it says press f1 to continue (maybe F3)

 

[Trifid]

What if it is not recognised in the bios?

I put xp on the harddrive from my pc, but I'm back to where I was before, with it not booting from C, and it asks for a system disk.