Laptop boot issues

I have a Gateway MX3412 laptop running windows media center 2005, that is not booting properly and constantly giving assorted errors, and most recently having difficulties with a forced recovery, destructive or data conserving. I have tried using a boot disk and formatting the drive from DOS, and it gives a message Invalid drive, or format not supported when I command it to wipe the c: drive, by typing FORMAT C:. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance