Formatting w/o a diskette drive?

[tech guy]

First of all, how do you format you OS drive. Second, do you need a floppy disk drive? And third, how can i fix my floppy drive.
It doesn't work no matter how many times i flipped the cable around or tried different cables and drives.
Do you think that it could be my motherboard?
I mean, it was working a while when it was first given to me...
My computer is:
A 333MHz Pentium 2 (the socket kind?...?)
8GB and 4GB HDD
Generic Motherboard
Anything else??

 

[GerkSide]

to format you go to the command line , type FDISK, this works with or without a boot disk, then you go through a couple of questions ex: Do you want to enable large disk support" ect.
get through all that crap , and go to "Delete Primary DOS Partition" , that should do it~!

 

[Ecniv]

Thats actually not a format. Thats deleting a Partition. If you do that and dont go back through and re-create a primary dos partition, you wont be able to re-install an OS.

I think what he was looking for is

C:\Format C: /q

 

[tech guy]

First of all, how do i get to the command line, second which command???is it this: C:\Format C: /q or this: C:/Format C:
??? What exacly do i have to type? Do you enter command line on bootup?

 

[GerkSide]

Thats actually not a format. Thats deleting a Partition. If you do that and dont go back through and re-create a primary dos partition, you wont be able to re-install an OS.

oops i forgot to mention that part

 

[Seloce]

On a windows9X/ME box, click the start button. Then click on shutdown. One of the options in the box that pops up will be to shut down into DOS mode. Do this one. After it finishes, your screen will be all black save for the command line which looks like this:

C:\>

At this point you want to type "format c:". Your screen will look like this:

C:\>format c:

Press enter and continue. It will prompt you once to make sure you want to format the drive. Make sure you have all your drivers (or at the very least, your chipset drivers and a way to connect to the internet). Then format the sucka.

On a Win2k/XP box, insert the OS installation cd. Again, make sure you have all the necessary drivers on a cd or different partition. Then click on the start button. Select shutdown. On the pop up box, select "restart".

After the computer shuts down and starts booting, you want to go into your BIOS configuration and make sure that you can boot from a CD (this is a litte different from BIOS to BIOS, consult your motherboard manual). After enabling the CD boot, exit and save the BIOS and continue the restart. The OS install will boot from the CD. If you read the menus carefully it will give you the option of formatting any of your partitions (drives) and allow you to choose the file system.