Partitioning & Formatting a hard drive

[Guest]

I am trying to partition & format a hard drive in a Compaq Presario 1200
laptop. It had Win ME & 2 partions originally. I have followed Microsoft
Article # 255867. The partitioning goes fine but when I try to format after
booting from a Win98 SE disk, I get the "Bad Command" error. It says to type
in "extract edb.cab format.com" to extract to the boot disk. I get a "cannot
open file edb.cab" error. Any ideas?

 

[Xandros]

If your question is related to a Windows 9x/Me then post to an appropriate
newsgroup. This group deals with the Windows XP operating system. While you
might think my response is harsh please understand that if this group was
open to posts on any subject it would become impossible to weed through.

 

[M]

I am trying to partition & format a hard drive in a Compaq Presario 1200
laptop. It had Win ME & 2 partions originally. I have followed Microsoft
Article # 255867. The partitioning goes fine but when I try to format
after
booting from a Win98 SE disk, I get the "Bad Command" error. It says to
type
in "extract edb.cab format.com" to extract to the boot disk. I get a
"cannot
open file edb.cab" error. Any ideas?

Seagate DiscWizard will work no matter what brand of hard drive you have.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I am trying to partition & format a hard drive in a Compaq Presario 1200
laptop. It had Win ME & 2 partions originally. I have followed Microsoft
Article # 255867. The partitioning goes fine but when I try to format after
booting from a Win98 SE disk, I get the "Bad Command" error. It says to type
in "extract edb.cab format.com" to extract to the boot disk. I get a "cannot
open file edb.cab" error. Any ideas?

You don't have the kind of diskette you think you have, and the
extract command is apparently not on it.

But, assuming that your intent is to install Windows XP, it doesn't
matter, because you are going about it all wrong. Just boot from the
Windows XP CD (change the BIOS boot order if necessary to accomplish
this) and follow the prompts for a clean installation (delete the
existing partition by pressing "D" when prompted, then create a new
one).

You can find detailed instructions here:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

or here
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how_do_i_install_windows_xp.htm

or here http://windowsxp.mvps.org/XPClean.htm

or here http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/clean_install.htm

 

[Bob I]

That's not likely to be a usable machine with Windows XP. Between the
odd hardware, minimal RAM and slow processor, the battery will probably
be dead before it finishes booting.