Problems with Dos

I have a question,I have windows 98se installed on my computer with 256 SDRAM and a P4 1.7Ghz cpu and I went to do a reformat on the drive using these commands format c: /s/q/u. It comes up with a message that says not enough memory to copy over system files, this happens in Dos mode. Did anyone have this sort of problem and why and how does this happen. Thanks.