Help needed, quick

[Whitebread]

Aright, I'm trying to reformat my fathers computer. It's a 4 year old Gateway that was in bad shape and just needed a fresh instal. It's a gateway. The company put the 2 optical drives on the first IDE chanel and the 250meg i-omega drive on the other channel. The HDD itself was attached to a promise IDE card. I put the format program, or whatever it is, on a disc and proceded to reformat at the A: prompt. The machine went through the format stage faster than it took to count clusters (it took like 2 seconds and the screen read 100%, format done). I was like WTF?!?!?!?! I then tried to install windows. While attached to the second IDE channel in his machine, the windows installer kept telling me that it couldn't read the drive. I took the drive up to my computer and installed it as a slave. It didn't show up in explorer, so I assumed it was formatted. I then put it in as master to try to install windows. This time the windows installed tried to format the drive again. It sped through it fast, in about 1 second then displayed an error saying that the format on the drive was incompadable with windows and that it couldn't install. Can someone help me format this damn drive properly and force an install of windows? Please? Sorry for the stupidly long post.

 

[Ice Czar]

Originally posted by Whitebread
Sorry for the stupidly long post.

the Enter key, when properly employed, will create paragraph breaks

then displayed an error saying that the format on the drive was incompadable with windows and that it couldn't install

It would be helpful to know what utilities where employed at what steps and what Operating Systems as well

Fdisk, Install CD, other
Your dads box and yours

 

[Whitebread]

Meh, don't worry about it. I got it to erase. I had to use an IBM disk utility and erased everything on the drive. I then FDSIked it and fomrated it. I ran into some CDROM errors cause I didn't have the right boot disk, but I solved that with some searching. I can't seem to get the zip drive reconized, but I think I can fix that.