• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Another problem with formatting!!! Need all the help I can get!

computermod14

computermod14

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2003
Messages
327
After I made the boot disk, dos 6.22 for windows xp, I shut down the computer, put in the floppy, and started it up. A little into the startup it sayed somthing like, Non-System disk or disk error, press any key when ready. I dont know what the heck the problem is or what I am doing wrong!!! :confused: Thx
 
Most likely your harddrive doesnt have an Operating System on it and you didnt select to boot floppy first in your bios. So when your computer starts up, it only looks at the HDD and then doesnt want to look elsewhere. Change the boot order in your bios to floppy first, then your HDD. That way it should boot up by floppy.
 
What the heck are you doing?

To format anything other than your system and boot drives, use Disk Management. To nuke Windows XP itself, use XP Setup.
 
This is an HP computer and when the computer is starting up i hit the delete button but nothing happens, i think the bios are locked up, how do i unlock them if i can?
 
It doesn't have to be the Delete key, not all BIOSes are from Phoenix/Award (AMI uses Delete now?). It can be F1, Esc or anything. Try some of those. And if all else fails see if you can find some support information from HP's website.

I guess you have tried and the CD-ROM is not a boot device? Just wondering why you are not using a bootable CD to install.
 
on my old HP i had to press F1 to get into the BIOS..
 
Ok, now, the setup is...Primary Master - ST380020A, Primary Slave - Auto, Secondary Master - CD-R/RW, Secondary Slave - Toshiba DVD-ROM. And when i click on the Primary Master it doesent say floppy it says...None, Auto, User Type HDD, CD-ROM, LS-120, ZIP, MO, and Other ATAPI Device. So now what???
 
What gives? Those settings are for the IDE controller. The floppy drive doesn't use the IDE at all - but has its own dedicated controller and port. You'll have to look deep into the BIOS setup menus for something like "boot sequence" or "boot first/second/third/etc. device".

And DOS 6.22 is an outdated operating system that cannot support a hard drive larger than 8.4GB total no matter what. The DOS 6.22 bootup detected an unsupported hard drive size in the system BIOS (in your case, you have an 80GB hard drive), and halts the boot with messages similar to what you've seen.

Moreover, you cannot format a hard drive with the boot floppy disk that is created under Windows XP - you'll have to use the Windows XP CD-ROM to boot your system from. (The boot disk created through Windows XP uses the version of DOS that Windows Me used - "DOS 7.1a".) But HP doesn't give you any such CD-ROM at all, but instead stores the "restore disk" on a hidden partition within the hard drive. The only legitimate way to unlock that hidden partition is to bring the system back to an authorized HP service center. And even then, HP will only restore the system to its original factory state, with all of the factory-installed programs and crap.

However, if your 80GB hard drive is completely blank, the DOS 6.22 disk still won't work with your system, due to the 8.4GB total hard drive size limitation of that OS. And even if it does work, you'll need a third-party driver for your CD drive just to even use the CD-ROM drive, since DOS 6.22 doesn't come with any such driver.

Alternatively, you could buy the full version of Windows XP (Home or Professional) on CD-ROM. But then you'll lose all technical support from HP if you go that route - which means that you'll be on your own if anything goes wrong.
 
computermod14 said:
I have windows xp pro, so how do i format if from that?
Click to expand...
The only way to format with Windows XP is if you boot from the original Windows XP CD-ROM.

I would like to ask you, is your hard drive on that HP empty? Or can you still boot into Windows from the hard drive?

If it's completely empty, then the way I've described in this post is the only way. Alternatively, there is a special set of Windows XP Professional startup floppy disks that can be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site. (You do that if that HP system that you are trying to install Windows cannot boot from a CD-ROM.) You download that set (be sure that it's for Windows XP Pro, and not Windows XP Home - the latter has its own set), then run its executable to extract those files (you'll need six floppy disks to get all of the files on). You'll need all six floppy disks when you're booting from the Windows XP Pro setup floppy set - and the Setup program will tell you which disk to put in.
 
Its not empty but i want it to be completely empty to factory settings, lol. Thats my goal
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top