# Unconditional Format



## rxm (Mar 20, 2004)

I am 12 hours into a reformat of my c drive. These are the commands that I have entered

Format c:/q
Invalid existing format
This disk cannot be quick formatted
Proceed with Unconditional format (y/n)
Y
Formatting
Trying to recover allocation unit (it is up to 57,000 on a 2gb hard drive)

Does anyone know how long this will take?

I am afraid of stopping the reformat process as I don't know whether that will do more harm than good. Any advice?


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

If you are getting that error, it sounds like the hard drive is starting to go bad. If this is the case, and given the price of drives, you might consider getting a new one. 

Also, if you have an older computer, make sure the BIOS will support whatever drive size you get.


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## Wet Chicken (Sep 11, 2000)

The proper command to unconditionally format is format /u. Is this a laptop or desktop? Like Bob said, drives that small are dirt cheap these days, probably you could find a 2 gig for around 10 bucks, maybe less. They will most likely charge you more for the shipping than the hard drive


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## rxm (Mar 20, 2004)

I don't think I have a hard drive problem as it was ok before I started this process. My goal is to install windows me. The current system has windows 98 upgrade over windows 95. It is a Sony VAIO and I am trying to do the install without the Sony Recovery Disk.


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## Wet Chicken (Sep 11, 2000)

I just formatted a *4 gig* hard drive this morning with * PartitionExpert*, and it took less than a minute


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## ~Candy~ (Jan 27, 2001)

What about just plain vanilla

format C:

???


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## john1 (Nov 25, 2000)

Did you run Scandisk beforehand?
that should take dodgy sectors out of the loop.


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