Partition & reformat disk uh oh!

[lenl1]

I have been having conflicts in my W98se so I decided to reinstall and while I was at it Iwas going to partion my drive (20GB).
I was able to partition it, picked fat32,went with 51% main partition,49%extended partition logical drive. BUT ... when it came to "format c:/s" I got "bad command" same with format d:s. Any ideas?
I had installed W98se and it seemed to format c&d and installed in C but after 1st restart, did not restart. I had to press reset. Anyway it completed the install and I now cant seem to get the modem to dial out? Everything seems to check out fine in properties and system. Possibly I should have installed the video, and sound drivers first?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Larry Kyrzyk

[This_Idiot]

Can you give us an exact breakdown of what you did in preparation for your reinstall (what backups you made, boot floppies etc).

[lenl1]

I was having problems with frequent crashes and freeze ups and decided it was time to
Reinstall W98se. I burnt all of my important files and info on a cd and dug out my boot disk and drivers. I had thought since I was reinstalling W98 I would also partition my 20 Gig Maxtor drive into 2 - 10 gig partitions. I had thought I would do this to keep my video files separate from the rest of the system. I placed the boot disk in A and rebooted The prompt came up giving me 3 choices of which I chose # 3 , which was start with no support from cd. At the A:\> prompt I typed “fdisk” which then brought me to the choose FAT32 which selected Y.
In the partition area I removed the one main partition, restarted the computer, got into the same area and created the primary drive to 10 Gig, then created the secondary drive, then the logical drive to the remaining approx. 9.5 Gigs. At this point I then had a C: & D: drive. I then rebooted and at the A:\> prompt typed, “format c:/s” “ Bad Command”
Came up. I then tried it with D: and the same thing happened? I then installed w98 se of which it requested the drives to be formatted, I pressed enter and it did so and started to install. At one of the restarting sessions it shut down but did not restart? It wouldn’t even restart when I hit the on/off switch on the computer? I had to unplug the plug it in again then it started. It went thru the rest of the installation but seemed to be doing a few funky thing during a few program installs. This is when I felt there may have been a problem with the format not working as it should have and or W98 not restarting when it should have. I got my trusty laptop out and came to the forum here and posted. While on I was checking a few posting and ran across one on Jan 29 01 – Wkuleck where the discusion
Was on partitioning and there was no real benefit to partitioning even with video editing.
The best was to have a number of separate drives. So I went with this advice as I felt W98se did’nt install well anyway and placed my drive back to 1 partition. I still could not format c thru dos and had done it thru W98. It then reinstalled and seems to be ok, although I had noticed last night when I came down stairs the screen was in small checkers and stripes, purples, and black didn’t know what to make of it? All of the drivers went in ok. Rebooted the unit and it started ok. I guess you’ll never learn if you don’t get your fingers dirty!
If you have any suggestion or advice I would appreciate it. Sorry for the novel.
Thank you, Larry K

[Brian Ellis]

Larry

I may be wrong, but I think your error is in the /s. You should not try to transfer a DOS system onto your hard drives, IMHO. I believe the correct way of doing this to simply format c: and d:, without switches. If this gives you a bad command message, then your format.com file (should be 49,575 bytes) ain't working (corrupt?). You then have to boot up again on your diskette, but choose with CD-ROM drive, making sure your Windows CD-ROM is there. I then recommend you copy the whole disk to a folder which I name WIN98 on your C: drive. Reboot without the CD-ROM drive on your diskette, type
C:
cd\win98
setup
and follow the instructions.

If your format.com is corrupt, there is a clean copy on your cd-rom but make sure the corruption isn't due to a virus. If your bios allows it, it may be better to use your cd-rom as the boot disk: you know that these files are virus-free (assuming it is not a pirated copy).

As for partitioning, I agree that partitioning will not achieve anything in video performance, but it is very useful for other reasons. On all my computers, I use abot 1.5 Gb for my C: partition and I have on it only WIN98, Windows and o/s and diag utilities like Norton, Sandra, Partition Magic etc. I have all the apps on a second partition and all the non-video data on a third partition. On one computer, I have a dedicated drive for video. I frequently change partition configs using Partition Magic, as requirements change (I have different partitions for Communications, Word Processing, CAD etc. apps).

Hope this helps.


------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[Flying dutchman]

Brian, if his "FDISK" offered him the FAT32 option it wasn't a DOS bootdisk but a Win98 bootdisk. His procedure was correct, yet he should have activated his primary partition before formatting it... And maybe checked his bootdisk for viruses...

I also recommend copying the contents of the cd's \win98 directory to the hard drive and install it from there! Installing from CD often fails because Windows has to reboot during installation. For my private purposes, I've made a bootable Windows CD to facilitate installation.

[mad99]

Sorry guys, but I think the problem with the format is quiet easy: "bad command or filename" means that the format.com (or .exe) was not found... (if I remember correctly, the program is on the CD, not on the bootdisk).

For the rest, you will have to mark the first partition "active" with fdisk (it doesn't matter if you do this before or after formatting the drive)

[lenl1]

Hi Guys and thanks.
If Mad99 is correct, then when I selected # 3 – boot up without cd support, then it would not be able to access the “format c:” program which is on the W98se cd. Is this correct? If so that would explain a few things. As for the boot disk It came with my W98se package and is a W98se boot disk ( sorry not dos) when I purchased the computer a year and a half ago. I do think the idea of copying W98 to c then setup thru c sounds like it could save me a lot of headaches. I also did activate the primary partition on all occations. Well it also seems things are working fine other than a conflict with my Aureal sound card. It seems that the Sound blaster pro emulator has an issue whereas it says There are no DMAs free of which it is taking up 01,03,and 07 and everything in system info seems fine, lots of free space? When I go to device manager, update driver it says its found the right drivers and restart the system, but this does not help. I will probably try and sellect a different DMA configuration to solve this problem.
Thank you guys.
Have a good day

[Sciascia]

Do yourself a favor and disable that SB Pro Emulation. Unless you are worried about playing a 1992 DOS game... It has no function inside of windows and will just suck up your precious resources. As for copying to disc and installing from there, it works great. I typically do it, because it is som much faster and occassionally you will get a CDRom that just refuses to work in DOS from the boot disc. I had this problem with my first CD Burner and learned the hard way. It is a pain to track down a DOS driver with no computer to connect to the internet!