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BodyArmour · 05:16 PM

Good Day to you all,..
while spending a couple of hours trying to find online help with format problems, with no understanding help to see, i've ended up here, so fingers crossed someone can help,...
When i format my brothers harddrive,it only formats 3 gig of it, but in fact it's a 160 gig hard dive,why is this? and when i reinstall windows, it installs almost complete then stops and says child? driver? problem? cannot continue.
a B I G thank you in advance for any replies!!:computer2

Bluefish

Hi BodyArmour!
First of all, welcome to PC Help Forum!

Who do you try to format the drive?
Also, has the drive been used before or is it brand new? Because it's possible that there are multiple partitions on it in that case.

Bluefish

BodyArmour

hello! THANKS FOR A SPEEDY REPLY!
yes i formatted it in dos , format c: which worked ok, but as i mentioned earlier, it only formats 3gig when its a 160gig Hard Drive,.
the hard drive had windows xp on it before i formatted it. it must be partitioned, how do i remove pratition without having windows installed or unable to install windows?
bye for now.

Hengis

You will need to remove the partition and create a "whole drive" partition. This process will remove EVERYTHING currently on the hard drive.

There is a great guide here: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html - concentrate on point 10 and above.

modelflyer

Originally Posted by BodyArmour

hello! THANKS FOR A SPEEDY REPLY!
yes i formatted it in dos , format c: which worked ok, but as i mentioned earlier, it only formats 3gig when its a 160gig Hard Drive,.
the hard drive had windows xp on it before i formatted it. it must be partitioned, how do i remove pratition without having windows installed or unable to install windows?
bye for now.

You stated somewhere that you formatted using dos and the original installation was winXP. XP uses the ntfs file system, dos cannot see that part of the disk. Almost always when partioning a disk to ntfs it leaves a portion of the drive un-partioned. In your case this happens to be 3 gig. Using the dos Fdisk utility remove all non dos partitions, then simply run WinXP installation utility from the cd. When you have remove all winxp will see the entire drive.

If you for some reason want to install Windows 98, you will have to obtain the newer large drive version of fdisk. You will find this at www.bootdisk.com, can't remember which section it's in perhaps utilities, have a look there.

Jonathan:computer2