formatting programs

[Zinedene]

Hi,

can anyone reccommend me a good program for formatting hard drives, including fat and NTFS..

Also, are any of these programs free?

Rgds,

Zinedene

[morriswindgate]

No program works as well as the ones included with the operating system.
In XP go to the control panel, admisitrator tool, drives and storage and you can partition and format from there.
For FAT32, you still cannot beat a 98SE bootdisk and FDISK/Format from it. Just remember, when you use FDISK enter percentage numbers for the partition instead of actual numbers.

[Zinedene]

I am continually getting XP errors with any program I use.
When I lool at the techinical info part it says it may be due to the Digital Product Identification or something like that.

The hard drive was reformattd about 3 days ago, and also activated. It was working fine, but has started messing up now.

I cant use Kazaa Lite, Real One PLayer, AVI preview, Media PLayer.....

I honestly dont know what im doing wrong here, but everyone just keeps saying 're-format and install', so I though I should try something else apart from the OS's formating program.

If I formated using an old Win98SE start up disk, would the format work? The partitions are NTFS.
I thought that the format wouldnt work as 98SE wasnt really up with the NTFS times...

The copy is Legal, I bought it in PC world, in UK.
It has been installed about 4 times on the hard drive.

Any help or comments appreciated...

Zinedene

[morriswindgate]

With the 98se disk you will have to re-partition the drive using FDISK and the it will be formatted in FAT32. I still use FAT32 and find nothing wrong with it under XP.
Given the problems you have had, before I do that I would run a Zero Fill utility on the hard disk to completely remove all traces of previous partitions. You can get it by doing a google search for Zero Fill.
And since you have had the digital product ID thing, do not upgrade to Windows Media Player 9 or movie maker 9 when you re-install.

[Zinedene]

ok, thanks , ill give it a try, and let you know how I get on

Thanks.

Zinedene