Problem reformatting the Wife's old laptop.

[SniperX13]

Ok, my wife has a old Dell Latitude PIII-450. I put Windows XP on it, and now we are selling it due to her getting a brand new Athalon running at a 2.2. Anyways, I cannot get the HD to format so I can install Win98se back on it.

every time I sit at the command prompt, and tell it to format, or fdisk, I get this msg

"Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPEN HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. would you like to force a dismount on this volume <y/n> then I select Yes, and I get

cannot lock the drive, the volume is still in use.

How can I get around this and wipe the HD completely clean???

thanks.

[sameintheend01]

are you in the command prompt in windows or are you totally in dos? if you are in windows, that might be your problem.

Suggestion: get to dos and run the win xp cd. you can format the drives right before it installs the software.

hope this helps

[Oz]

Windows XP uses the NTFS file system, you will need to use the Windows XP CD to format the drive in FAT32 before you can do very much, I suspect. (I think you need to delete the current partition and then it will format the unpartitioned space).

With a laptop of those specs, I would be putting Windows 2000 (SP4) on it instead of 98SE. 98SE is a total dinosaur and not conducive to modern computing.

Please post here if you want detailed instructions on anything, but I assume if you're OK formatting and re-installing an OS, you might be OK on your own.