Skip to Main Content
PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
July 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Formatting with Windows 9X

Windows 9X provides several ways to perform a logical format. You can use the fdisk and format utilities on a Windows 9X Startup Disk to partition and format a hard disk before installing Windows 9X. Once Windows 9X is installed, you can perform a logical format by right-clicking a volume in My Computer or Windows Explorer and choosing Format, or by using the command-line format utility. Command-line format uses the syntax format <drive:> /switches, where <drive:> is the drive letter assigned to that volume, and the available switches that pertain to hard disk formatting are as follows:

/v:<label>

Specifies the volume label.

/q

Specifies that format should perform a “quick” format, which reinitializes the filesystem but does not perform an actual format. Using this is a fast way to delete all data on a drive.

/c

Tests clusters that are currently marked bad.

/s

Copies system files to the disk being formatted, making it bootable.

Unlike the Windows NT command-line format utility, the Windows 9X utility does nothing that you can’t do using the graphical utilities, so there is little reason to use it. For flexibility, we prefer to use PartitionMagic to partition and format a drive before installing Windows 9X.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Computer Busses

Computer Busses

William Buchanan
Hacker Techniques, Tools, and Incident Handling

Hacker Techniques, Tools, and Incident Handling

Sean-Philip Oriyano, Michael Gregg

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600513XErrata Page