Format not supported in this drive

[Guest]

Why is that whenever i want to format my hard drive, an error appears "Format is not supported in this drive"..kindly please help me to know what's the cause of it? thanks...

 

[Tom Porterfield]

Why is that whenever i want to format my hard drive, an error appears "Format is not supported in this drive"..kindly please help me to know what's the cause of it? thanks...

Are you trying to format the drive that has windows? If so, the only
way to do that is to boot from your XP CD or a boot floppy and format
from there. If using the XP CD, you can format from within the recovery
console, or by starting setup of a new install and going just as far as
the screen where you select/format the destination partition.
--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP MCE
http://support.telop.org

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup only.

 

[Guest]

to format I prefer using the Windows 98/ME boot disk, not the XP stuff. just put it in, boot it and type 'format' (make sure its at the C: drive first) you can probably find those floppies from sites somewhere.. lol thx for reading

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

If he uses NTFS as opposed to FAT32, he can't simply boot and type format,
he'd have to first go to FDISK, delete the non-dos partition, create a new
partition, exit, reboot and format. If he doesn't do that, when he boots
and tries the format command it will be unrecognized.

Second, if he chooses to use NTFS, there's no point in using a 9x boot
floppy as he'll just have to format again during setup.

Finally, 9x tools should not be used with XP, your experience
notwithstanding.