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Format hard drive

Posted By : Scott of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on December 4, 2001

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I had a disc in the A: drive downloading some information. The Net freezed up. I ctrl-alt-deleted it, forgetting to take the disc out. When it gets to a certain point it told me to take out the disc. When I tried to continue, it said 'error loading operating system, setup cannot continue'. I couldn't go on to Windows. How do I fix this?

This question was answered on December 4, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


Hi lizard,

From what I gather you are trying to download windows 9x.Have you formatted your drive first?If not this is what you need to do.Please print this page out.

1 run fdisk

2 fdisk will ask you for a file size fat16 or fat32 (chose fat32)

3 fdisk will have a menu with 4 or 5 items (5 items if more than 1 hd's exist)

4 delete partitions in this order

NON-DOS

Logical drives

exteded DOS

Primary DOS

5 Create DOS partition in this order

create primary DOS

Create Extended DOS

Create logical drives

6 ESC out of FDISK to get back to a; prompt

7 Reboot

8 At the a; prompt type (format c:/s

9 When format is complete, remove floppy and reboot to the c: prompt

Now you are ready to install your OS win 95,98

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Posted by Scott of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on December 4, 2001

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