Reformating hard drive with Windows XP

I am trying to reformat my hard drive. In the dos promt i keep getting an error that says format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. And when i try to dismount it still cannot lock the drive. The volume is still not in use.

Can anybody help me out with instructions.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

lol, what on earth does that question have to do with Dos PROGRAMING?? Since it was a stupid question ill give a stupid answer, you did restart and boot from a bootdisk didnt you??

Dont need to have a boot disk, just after the bios loads press f8 and select Command Prompt with CD ROM Support (or something along those lines)

I don't know if the way that [F8] thing works has changed since win98 but, surely using that method is using the command.com and other utilitys on your hard drive, I would try a boot disk with utilitys also

Windows XP does not have dos(which is stupid).

Windows XP has a DOS-style command processor, but it's almost worthless - it's incompatible with most of my programming projects. Take my advice and stick with DOS or Linux!

Hi,

Firstly, go into your BIOS and ensure that the floppy disk drive is the first device, from which the processor attempts to boot.

Then insert a Windows boot disk of some kind (doesn't really matter which, Windows 98 will do), with the format.com program on it, and boot from that. Once at the DOS prompt, use format.com to format the drive.

Good Luck,

Hi,

Firstly, go into your BIOS and ensure that the floppy disk drive is the first device, from which the processor attempts to boot.

Then insert a Windows boot disk of some kind (doesn't really matter which, Windows 98 will do), with the format.com program on it, and boot from that. Once at the DOS prompt, use format.com to format the drive.

EDIT: Oops, sorry about the above post; forgot to log in!

Good Luck,