Formatting my hard drive?????!?

[SteveGreenway]

Hi,

I’m having problems formatting my hard drive, can you help? Here’s what’s happening:

I have an old work laptop (Sony VAIO PCG-F807) Running Windows 2000 SP4 - Professional Edition. Seeing this was a work laptop running on a small network I deleted many of the network files when I got the PC a year back to free up some space. I now have C:VAIONOTE (7.98GB) and D:LOCAL DISK (3.21GB)

The first problem comes in here:

I can’t get to DOS (you know, ‘old school’ DOS, not the command prompt/DOS pre Windows)

Old PC’s I had had the option of restarting in DOS mode when you go ‘Start’ ‘Shut Down’ This PC does not have that option. I then decided to restart the PC and hit F8 when it is booting up. It turns out I can’t get to DOS from here either. The only DOS related option is “Restart in Safe Mode with MS DOS” Tried this, it starts up in semi old school DOS, safe mode in the corners. I type “Format C:”, it comes up to say:

************************************************** ******************

The type of this file system is FAT32 - great, I knew that!

Proceed with format Y/N – Yes

Verifying 8197M

Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first: ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.

Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? <Y/N> - I click y.

Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use.

Then it just goes back to:

C:\

************************************************** ******************

I am assuming this is because I am still in a “semi Windows state?” Safe Mode is still written in the 4 corners of the screen and I did have a Windows dialog box appear at startup.

I think I need to start DOS (as it would look without Windows installed) But don’t know how? No options on startup pressing F8 or in the start menu.

Any ideas/answers would be greatly appreciated. If you could suggest another way of getting rid of ALL Windows flies (many viruses) and loading Win XP and starting from scratch, that would be an option too. Ideally a format though?

Thanks in advance

Steve
stevegreenway2004@yahoo.co.uk

[Murf]

Hi, Steve

Welcome to CTH

1st I hope you don't mind, but I edited your HTML code to make the post shorter and easier to read. Did not change any of the wording.

You can actually get to "True DOS" in W2K using a Windows 98 Boot disk. You can get one HERE I suggest downloading the file Windows 98 Custom, No Ramdrive, then double click on the file and it will extract to a clean floppy.

Now boot with the floppy and you will end up at the A:\> prompt in DOS. Where you can format the drive.

Also if you are going to load Windows XP you can boot from the XP CD and partition and format the drive from there. Just make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the CDROM as the 1st boot device.