Hard drive formating

[pjphilli (Peter)]

Hi
Anyone know where I can find simple software to make a bootable disk for formating PC IDE hard drives (partitioning software not necessary).
Cheers Peter

[pluto (Hugh)]

I may have misunderstood, I think you mean you want to boot into some kind of environment where you can format your disk...?

What do you need to format it as?

You can't format it from within Windows? or whatever OS you're using?


I would use a live cd of Fedora (or some other Linux distro):
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD

Or this site has floppy and cd boot disks for windows, from memory (it's been a loooong time) the win 95/98 disks should have format.exe on them: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Or maybe something like this: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=24424

[pjphilli (Peter)]

Hi Hugh
I have looked into the links you have suggested and I have bought Eddie's
Maintenance CD. This contains a lot of utilities for maintaining hard drives including formatting. It contains a pretty extensive list of utilities and appears a bargain at $10. Thanks for your help.
Cheers Peter

[rogerco (Roger)]

I seem to remember that most of the drive manufacturers have a disk image you can download to create a boot disk that then has utilities to analyse their disks, fx bad sectors and do base level format.

[pjphilli (Peter)]

Hi Roger - Thanks, I will also look into this. Cheers Peter