Help formatting Harddrive

[sbrown02]

I've got a Gateway P2-350 running Win-XP. I have two Harddrives. The primary is a 28gig FAT32 which is where XP is loaded. I also have a second 8Gig drive that a few days ago was formated NTFS. I wasn't using all that much so I decided to reformat to FAT32 so I could load another OS. However, XP won't let me reformat. Everytime I go to format from within My Computer, I select the drive and select Format and it says:

"Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive. Then try formatting again."

I've tried everything I can think of. I don't open any apps, and as far as I can tell the drive has nothing on it. Recently, I tried to reformat the drive using a disk utility from my 28 gig Western Digital drive. When it went to reformat, it did so as FAT, and reduced the size of the drive down to 2Gig, so now the drive shows its size as 2gig instead of 8gig. I believe this is due to the limitation of the FAT format.

Bottom line is I'd like to get the drive back to its 8gig size under FAT32. Then I plan on loading Win98, so I can dual boot my computer under either XP or 98.

Thanks

[corosus]

have you tryed starting up with a bootdisk and doing the formating from dos ( make sure you ave the right disk)

[sbrown02]

I don't have a boot disk. How do I create one for Win-XP?

Thanks

[newme]

you can get a bootdiskhere (http://www.bootdisk.com/)

[glc]

You can repartition and reformat it from within Disk Management in XP. No bootdisk required.

Note that it's not easy to set up a dual boot 98/XP unless 98 is installed first.

[mike breck]

The easiest way to set up a dual-boot if Win98 is added AFTER XP, is to use a third-party Boot Manager.

http://www.osloader.com/

HTH