Hi,

Can I start of by saying a big thank you to everyone who has helped or offered advice on previous issues.

My system is so corrupt at the mo that everything is starting to fail, I cant copy and paste no matter what i try and now i get 'CentinelVxD error message and my computer power goes to maxium in the space of a few mins and runs really really slow with pages taking minutes to load instead of seconds.

I cant even use system restore beyond this month and theres no point anyway because the puter has been playing up well before then.

So if anyone can tell me, How do I get into Dos to completely format my harddrive, or is there another way, I tried using the command line but get 'format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process' message and then asks me to try a dismount but that fails ?

So come on peeps, How do I format .....

Valium eating Teddy. xx

I once had the same problem. il tell you what i did
to cut the long story short i had coped a virus
now i formatted my harddrive
but to do this i removed the little battery on the mother board wich saves things to your bios
that resets time and bios settings to defalt
then again i formated the hard drive then installed everything to scratch
it helped alot
but in your case i dont have a clue why you cant format
best thing to do is ,enter bios and change startup to cd-rom and try again
or try reseting bios with the battery ,dont forget to place battery back,lol
hope i helped

try putting your window cd in when it is booting or put it in then restart it then you boot it from the cd and reformat the harddrive then reinstall windows

Do you have System Restore CD's or a restore partition? If you do just run them and they will format your harddrive and install your computer to the state in which you purchased.

If you do and choose to use them backup anything you may need.

Teddy,
Try booting from your Windows XP cd rom. You should be able to reach everything you need to repair your computer from the cd. If that doesnt work, try a clean re-install of Windows XP.

Good luck.

Hi Hammy, This should sort you out.

1. when format fails the best approach is to fdisk; delete the partition your O/S is on.

2. I'll presume you know how to set your pc to boot from cdrom. make the change and place the cd in the drive.

3. Boot your pc and when the boot is accepted you will be given a choice to boot from cd-rom or hard-drive. At the bottom you will be given a command prompt option....select this.

4. when you are in prompt select FDISK

5. Assuming you have only a primary dos partiton and no seperate partitons. From the menu select "delete primary dos partion." you will be given prompts for the vol label ( should be blank ) and a yes or no prompt. Hit yes and the partition and its O/s are gone.

Come out of there and back to the main FDISK menu. Choose create dos partion ( primary). Go throught hte prcedure, which is quick and your new partition is complete. You will be prompted to format the drive after restart.

6. Boot the pc and it will start from cd, when the prompt comes up select "start with cd-rom" support.(basically you want to run an installation). the installation should then format your drive for a new O/s to be installed.

I have fixed quite a few pc's where the format command doesnt work, FDISK always seems to do the trick.

Do you know if you have a "tattoo" (a tag on the hard-drive from the manufacturer) on your system?