formatting troubles

I'm trying to format the HD of a laptop my mom got (some old piece of junk). The volume label is in ASCII. All these weird characters. Anyways, before the format, Scan Disk gives me all these errors that it wants me to manually fix. FDISK isn't helping either because I can't reproduce the ASCII characters when it asks me to input them. The label command isn't working either.

I just want to rename the volume label, delete the partition, create and new one, format it and install Windows 98 on it. Help please.

In DOS, you can type LABEL while in the drive you want to relabel to relabel it without typing the old label. The hard drive does sound a bit dodgy though from what you described :p

Bad command or file name

My mom got in from my uncle and he got from work. I have no idea what they did to it.

Boot off a boot disk. Or if you have a Linux install disk lying around, boot off that. Or get Partition Magic or another graphical HD utility.

There's no floppy drive. I tried to boot off Red Hat 8 and Mandrake 9, no luck, invalid system disk. I can't boot into Windows since the volume label is messed up, so no can do with the Partition Magic.

So it has a CD drive? Burn yourself a Knoppix CD. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/ Yeah, the site's in German, but there are some US mirrors. Knoppix is a Linux distro that boots entirely off the CD, and lives entirely in a ramdisk once booted. Doesn't even need a hard drive. The Linux version of fdisk doesn't make you type in partition names, it shows a list of numbered partitions and you pick a number. If you don't know how to work fdisk in Linux I can help you. Knoppix is absolutely great for doing system recovery, among other things.

Ok, thanks. I'll try that out tomorrow. Now I'm off to bed though. :(

EDIT: I was able to get access to the C drive through DOS and I started deleting all the corrupted directories, over 100, heh; installed Windows, did a fresh format and installed again.

I'm considering making the machine a Linux only one. What's a good distro of Linux that can run on a 120MHz Pentium, 24MB of RAM, 800MB of HD space?

Ouch. You can use Gentoo and get the pre-compiled version (GRP). Or compile it yourself if you have a month to wait for it (literally...). Nah, I'd stay away from Gentoo.

There are distros made especially for slow computers. http://www.vectorlinux.com/ for example. Or http://mulinux.sunsite.dk/ . Slackware is pretty good, but hasn't released a new version for many many months, so it might be dead. RedHat and Mandrake offer minimal installs too, don't they? I've read about people using Debian on machines almost as slow as yours. Honestly all distros are probably about the same. Linux can run fine on a 386 even. You should just try a bunch till you find one that works OK.

You're not going to want to run Gnome or KDE though, with that slow a computer. You'll probably want to use Fluxbox/Openbox, or at the very most XFCE4. But those are available for most distros, pretty sure.

Just a question, but why can't he get a boot cd (no disk drive right) and boot into DOS, then use fdisk?

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Originally posted by Yamaneko
FDISK isn't helping either because I can't reproduce the ASCII characters when it asks me to input them.

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Oops I missed that. Does it just spit nonsense at you? Try just hitting enter key. *nod* I've had that happen to me before.

I fixed the problem last week. :p You can't delete a partition using FDISK without entering the partition label, which in most cases is "Hard Disk" or something similar. And I have no idea, nor do I think it's possible, to reproduce ASCII characters like a heart, a smiley face, etc., in DOS.

Anyways, problem fixed. *closes*