Fat 16 is limited to 2 gig partions. If you are using Win 95 OSR2 or above,
you can enable large drive support and format with Fat 32 which will allow
you to use the entire drive.

If using 95 OSR2 and up, use a boot disk from Win 98 (this will also give
you CD-Rom support). Fdisk and remove all partions and be sure to reboot the
computer by turning the computer off completely, then turning it back on.

When you reboot, go back into Fdisk and recreate your partions. Besure to
enable large disk support in the opening sceen and your new partions will be
fat 32. you should now be able to format the whole drive.

If you need any more help, feel free to email me.

Fran

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Hachmeyer" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 5:02 PM
Subject: Formatting drives and fdisk /mbr


> I've been trying to recycle some older pc's (Pentium I or
> better) as giveaways to middle school students.
> Because the machines were often used in offices for 2 years
> or so and may contain confidential data after a previous
> life of 2-3 years in student labs, I've been running fdisk
> to remove all partitions, fdisk /mbr to wipe the mbr, then
> setting drive to one large partition and formatting it as
> fat16.
> Problem is that about 1/2 the drives won't format again;
> either format just stops or I get errors indicating that the
> drive is bad.  I have not been running scandisk before
> starting, but all the machines were working  on a daily
> basis prior to my acquisition.
> Am I losing the drive data that flags bad sectors by
> performing the fdisk /mbr and then failing format because
> the drive can't bypass the bad sectors?   Am I doing
> something in the wrong sequence?
>


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.476 / Virus Database: 273 - Release Date: 4/24/2003

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml