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  • #2123941

    Formatting

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    by tamilindia ·

    I have a Dell Latitude CPi laptop and it used to have Windows2000. Recently I had it fdisk and now it is unable to format? It always gives out “bad command or file name”.
    Using Win98 cdrom bootdisk. Can Anyone help?I don’t think that it has bad sector? Could it be virus?

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    • #3561354

      Formatting

      by beermonster ·

      In reply to Formatting

      Hi,
      I’m probably wrong, as this seems a bit obvious – but if you are getting this message every time you type ‘format’ then are you sure that format.exe is in the path – IE do a dir and check that you can see it….

      • #3561311

        Formatting

        by tamilindia ·

        In reply to Formatting

        First and foremost, there is no floppy drive, I am using Win98 installation disk to do fdisk and formatting and in the harddrive itself that is an a:\
        I found the EBD.cab file which contains the format.com file(in the A drive)….. that is why I don’t understand… use the extract command to no avail. So is there anyway in which we could use the installation disk of Win98 to do formatting? I have use the A:\ to do formatting and D:\ which is the cdrom drive to try and format but to no avail.

    • #3561348

      Formatting

      by tekguy610 ·

      In reply to Formatting

      Sounds correct but the correct file is ::format.com::
      🙂

      • #3562405

        Formatting

        by tamilindia ·

        In reply to Formatting

        Poster rated this answer

    • #3561341

      Formatting

      by dpalsen ·

      In reply to Formatting

      I don’t have a whole lot new to add. The simple answer you were already given is probably correct. However, I did want to let you know where to look for the format command. It will be in a directory called “commands”. It’s just not in your path,though. Look around on the CD, and it will be there.

      • #3562406

        Formatting

        by tamilindia ·

        In reply to Formatting

        Poster rated this answer

    • #3561284

      Formatting

      by grbeckmeyer ·

      In reply to Formatting

      Sounds to me like your system is not booting to the CD. You will have to enter your BIOS setup and set the CD as the first boot device, or simply create a Win98 boot disk on another system and boot to the floppy.

      • #3562407

        Formatting

        by tamilindia ·

        In reply to Formatting

        Poster rated this answer

    • #3562613

      Formatting

      by ken ·

      In reply to Formatting

      Hi: Several correct things have been said but some have also been missed. First the correct command is format.com. Second the location of the file is D:\win98\command assuming that your cd-rom is drive D:. And last but not least you said you had windows 2000 prof insalled on this drive. Was the format done at that time NTFS ( new technology file system ) the current level is 5 and I have had some trouble getting rid of a level 5 partition myself. I had to use a utility named delpart (free on internet download it.) to first delete the ntfs partition then use win 98 version of Fdisk to recreat the partition. Then format. This is only true if the 2000 install was done to NTFS. If not the d: drive location for format.com should work.

      Later,Ken

      • #3562408

        Formatting

        by tamilindia ·

        In reply to Formatting

        Thanks guys, the format done at that time is ntfs and yes I have to use delpart to get rid of the partition. The directiive for the format.com was found in Win98 folder in the cd. Thank you guys for the help.

    • #3562404

      Formatting

      by tamilindia ·

      In reply to Formatting

      This question was closed by the author

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