Communist Microsoft!!!

It's crap like this that makes me hate Microsoft at times.

I am on a PC running Windows 2000 Professional with a "dual-boot" (That shouldn't be a dual-boot due to the upgrade from 98 to 2000, but it considers it one, and also since the file system was converted to NTFS, Win 98 is no longer accessable.). How in the frickin' hell can you get the hard drive formatted?! It keeps telling me that there's a program running that is running that will not allow the formatting to continue, but with the task manager, it says there's nothing running. Or if anyone can tell me how to get a DOS prompt without loading Windows 2000, that'd be great, since they removed the F5 shortcut for pre-boot prompt.

This computer's so mucked up, it needs to be wiped out. Help me!!

If you boot from the installation CD, does it give you an option to format before you install? It does for XP, at least. Maybe 2000 is different. You could try making a boot floppy and formatting from there. Or (bad idea) just start destroying files at random until Windows is so messed up that you HAVE to format to reinstall Windows. Sometimes I'd have to do things like that when I had ME because if the HD looked even a little salvageable, Windows happily installed itself onto my already-messed-up HD. But if you mess it up bad enough, Windows gives in and lets you fix it.

There are some 3rd party partition managers you can buy/download that should let you format a hard drive, if all else fails. Partition Magic or something, I think that's the name I've heard of. Linux installation CDs usually have a partition manager built in as part of the install process too, you could use one of those and Ctrl-Alt-Del out before you actually do the installing. But that'd be screwy.

Basically what Dr Unne said. Just use a bootdisk and boot into DOS. After that you can use a 3rd party software to format your HD (such as PartitionMagic 7) or use DOS' built-in format program. Just enter this:

format C:

Of course, you can also use other drive letters. ;)

Heh, yeah - the reasen why you can't reformat from within Windows is because Windows itself is runnng on the drive :p You'll need a boot disk or installation CD or something. Just make sure there's nothing on the drive that you want to keep before formatting, or at least back that stuff up first :)