Kilo

LOL I hate to do this... its sad. How do i format the damned HD??? everything i attemp (while windows is running) sys it cannot execute due to the fact the volume/drive is being used by another process. My guess is i have to do something special when the computer is booting up and command line format before windows is loaded... the only question is how?

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uman

If you want to format because you are installing Linux over Windows, your Linux distrobution should include formatting tools. If you aren't doing that, you just want to change your windows partitions, get a liveCD that has parted/qtparted/gparted/kparted/whatever the latest parted tool is and use that.

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somehollis

I assume that this is related to your wanting to install linux (from another thread). When you run the installer, it will repartition your drives and format them for you to set the appropriate file system. Formatting as you are attempting is unnecessary.

If you're just curious, however, to format it, you'd need to boot from another device. I don't know of a way to format a drive that the OS is currently running from.

edit: I swear uman just types faster than me...

Kilo

thanks i ton for all the feedback. Im burning the gentoo ISO to cd right now then i will attempt this!

Im going try gentoo while i attempt to get these 5 iso's for fedora redhat

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Jimbo

IIRC, the Gentoo installer uses fdisk. And if you follow the handbook, it'll walk you through things pretty well.

If you have a DVD burner, you might look into the FC5 DVD .iso

john Wesley

Failing this; Create a boot disk then from A: type c: format.

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DaWei

Obviously you can't erase/reformat a disk which is running the formatting software (and expect to successfully finish). That's like using your car to push your car into the crusher and expecting everything to work out, and drive it home later.

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Harakim

No it's not, the formatter and kernel are loaded into memory. I'm pretty sure it could format the drive (if the creators wanted it to), though there would be some strange results when it finished.

DaWei

I could write you a program stored on disk that would format your drive just fine. Don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Now go try it with YOURS.

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