formatting the Hard drive of a Laptop pr

I am having a problem formatting a Hard Drive for a laptop.

First of all I have a five percent Dos format already on there.

Heres my problem:

I type format C: /s at the prompt then it says Formatting 157.46M then it stops at 95 percent completed and you can here the Hard Drive doing something then I get this message

Not ready
format terminated

What does this mean? How come I can’t format the hard drive to where I’m able to install windows 98 too?