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December 29th, 2004 03:00

SETUP DISK CANNOT FIND DRIVE C

I have a  latitude CPx laptop with windowsXP. My hard drive is "C"  with no partitions and 6 GB capacity. Recently some nasty spyware  has infested my system so  I want to format C and  clean reinstal windowsXP. On the laptop  I can use either a CD or a floppy through the modular bay,but not both at the same time
 
When I try to run the set up CD on the modular bay it  takes me to  A  prompt but  it  cannot find drive C which I want to format. Instead it makes C the MS-RAMDRIVE. before reaching A I also see the message that drive C does not contain valid FAT partition etc etc....
 
The  BIOS show the follopwing
Dell Latitude CPx J750GT Setup  BIOS Version A08
 
Primary Hard Drive:   6495 MB
Diskette Drive A:        Modular Bay
Diskette Drive B:        Not Installed
Diskette Reconfig:      Any Time
 
Boot Cohfiguration
Boot First Device:       CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive
Boot Second Device:  Internal  HDD
Boot Third Device:       CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive 
 
There is no auto detect feature for HDD and for all boot devices the possible settings are:
 
  NONE- INTERNAL HDD - DISKETTE DRIVE - CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive - MODULAR BAY HDD - PCI SLOT NIC - DOCK11/PORT11 NIC - CARDBUS NIC
 
All passwords in BIOS are set to DISABLED. The BIOS version is A08.
 
Why is the primary drive appearing as 6495 MB when I have  a 6GB drive.?
How can I get to drive C to format it?  Please advise.
 
 

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3.2K Posts

December 29th, 2004 09:00

Put the CD drive in the bay and the XP CD in the drive. At boot hit the F12 key and select CD/DVD/CDRW to boot from. Follow the prompts and during the XP setup you have a chance to Delete the partition then create a new one and then format the partition.

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December 30th, 2004 01:00

Nothing happens when I hit F12 at boot. However, I can change the boot sequence to CD via F2.  After that when I boot  (with XP CD  inside )  I end up with " A  prompt."  If I change  that to D and  run setup.exe I get a message that this program cannot run in DOS mode.

Is there another way of finding and formating drive C without using the XP CD? I may want to install Win98 instead on it.

 

 

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8 Posts

December 30th, 2004 13:00

Go in under d:
type cd i386
then type winnt
 
This is the way to access Windows XP installation.
Good Luck! 

Message Edited by robaan on 12-30-2004 09:33 AM

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