Topic: My hardrive won't format.

[Juan-PedroMartinez]

I've been trying to reformat my hardrive but it keeps failing.  I get a message telling me to close all windows showing the drive content and any utilities using the drive.

How do I make sure that all such utilities are closed?  And if that's not the problem, then what could it be?

I would appreciate any help.

[Clive]

Juan.  One of our techies will be along very soon.

[Sandra]

Hi Juan Pablo and welcome aboard.
If you are using XP and are trying to format your boot drive/partition from inside windows then I dont think it can be done.
The format option doesnt actually function as such.
If you have a boot disc on a floppy then set the bios to boot from floppy and when it boots to the A prompt type Format C: and press enter  

If you need a boot disk you can get one from :

www.bootdisk.com

[firfirikos]

Or else you can put winXp cd (If you are using winXp),press R for recovery,and then type Format C:,like Sandra said.

[Adept]

Or even boot from the XP CD and delete the existing partition using the partition manager tool in the setup process.

You can then add a new partition and format it from the same tool

[ketamininja]

Hmmm...


What OS are you using... XP I presume!
Are you trying to format another hard drive other than the C drive? If you are trying to format the C drive, you can't do it from Windows because Windows is using that drive!