A bit of assistance

Ok, here is my situation. I am attempting to reformat my Gateway Slimline PC running Windows ME. I attempt to use a format C prompt and I get a small message telling me it is aborting the format. Then when I put in the system restore disc I get a list explaining to me that the drive may not be partitioned or that the drive may have viruses on it. I have performed virus and trojan scans on it and it comes up clean. I have called about the problem and that gets me no place. Is there a way that I can reformat this, any help would be wonderful. Peace.

OH Yes! I have also tried the boot disc I created for it and the universal boot discs. Ok, thats all.

i can not really make a assumption like this with out trying to troubleshoot the thing myself, but it sounds to me like it might just be a bad drive. run a in depth scandisk from the command prompt and see if you find any bad sectors. just a thought.

Start with the basics. Go into BIOS setup and see if there
is a feature that protects the Master Boot Record or The Boot
Sector against being written.
It may be called by various names like "virus protection" etc.

This is a feature in many new computers that must be disabled
in order to format, partition, or install an OS.

Also, Windows may not allow you to format from a dos window.
You gotta make sure you have everything you need on hand
before you format, because, you can't go back once you've
started.

What kind of installation media do you have, a normal windows
install CD or a proprietary system restore disk from the
computer manufacturer?

I have a COMPAQ, and it has its own restore disk with a Norton Ghost
file. I think the drive has to be already partitioned and formatted
for this to work, but I assume that a normal microsoft windows
install CD will partition and format the drive, wiping all viruses.

Set the bios to boot from floppy. Get bootable floppy with fdisk and format.
fdisk first to make partitions. Then format them with format
Then use system "recovery" CD

Otherwise, get full installable version of windows.
:cool:

I have an older gateway that has a restore cd from gateway and the standard windows 98 cd. Im not sure if your trying to do the install from the restore cd or from the standard. AS for the restore, all it has on it is the basic software and drivers, Ive had to boot from the windows 98 cd inorder to format my hard drive. Just pop it in, then reboot, select boot from cd rom, then should give you the option to reinstall os with format or without. Like previosly said, gateway might not like you trying to reformat in dos mode and could be forcing you to format with the initial os cd. I know it can be very frustrating as I have an emachine that did the same thing. Hope this helps a bit.

If you are going to format anyways, my advice is go to DOS and just make a new partition using the fdisk command. It will be fast, and will probably work. Because it sounds like your computer has some major malfunctions, and it also sounds like you can't detect any viruses. Try fdisk. :)

This may not help, as I am not a PC giu and this did not happen to me but....

My friend had a Toshib@ (don't want to get JP sued!!!!) and it was pre-partitioned by the factor...evidently he got a virus on the on of the non-eraseable sections... long story short he had to return it to the factory to have it fixed....

My friends parents have a brand computer also with Windows ME and it had major errs. There were kernel errs, program errs, theme errs that weren't running. So when I went to crash, I had to instead of hitting F8 to get into the advanced start up menu, which it would not let me do, I had to go into bios, make it so itd show me the advanced startup menu so I could get the command prompt while windows was not running and then format.