Formating harddrive

Hi, I have been given a laptop and want to put linux on it, but have no experience of formatting hard drives since the world of windows 98.

This is an xp machine with a cd drive only (no floppy) and there is no option to boot it into DOS, only safe mode with command line.

How do I go about formatting this drive, can I do it through the command prompt found in windows? I kind of guessed that you couldn't.

I have Mandrake that I want to put on this and I tried installing over the top, but no joy. I think it should work fine though if I can start a fresh.

Any help would be apreciated.

Frinkbubble

You can use a windows xp boot disc to format your hdd.
Download the image from here, burn to cd then select the cdrom as your first boot device in the system bios and insert the bootable cd before restarting.
This will give you a command prompt with the tools you need to format.

Any linux installation CD will format the hard drive as
a normal part of the process. If the installer fails, it's
probably some sort of hardware incompatibility.
The installer may offer a variety of command prompt
options as workarounds for different circumstances.
:cool:

Thanks for your replies, I did finally format the drive, though have not yet successfully installed linux on the thing yet, I think mr green you are on the money here mate.

Fripe stringent