Huge problem...

ok i decided to reformat my computer cause i was getting some major slowdown and i was getting some norton errors saying that the program had created and illegal operation and must be shut down but when i would click the ok thing i would get a huge blue screen saying "kernal syntek error" or something along those lines....anyways i went to reformat and i put in the startup disk and when the chose with cd rom support or with out i chose without...which i thought was right....then when the command prompt came up i just typed "Format c:" and then it started formating well a few minutes later i would get an error saying "formatting error format terminated" so i tried and tried again finally it worked once and then i went to format my other partishions (not sure one spelling) there was c: d: and e: well i could only format d: and couldnt fine e: so there was that problem.....

Im wondering if i did something wrong...and if so what....
and
is there a way that i can just clear the entire hard drive of partishions and everything someone told me to just get like a huge magenet and slap that on there but i wasnt sure if that was going to work the way i needed to or if it would just hurt everything even more.....

if you can help that would be great..... or if you need to know more just tell me what....t hanks

anyone?....i really need some help...

Boot from your system CD and initialize the drive from there. I wouldn't mess with magnets .

I'll try to help. first of all, if u would format the whole hard drive. use the fdisk command. I think u can have this if u create a bootup disk then I think that its there. In fdisk it will also ask how many partition but don;t ask me how. hope I'd help in a way.

Oh ya.. do get Partition Magic, and you'll be straight up crazy to slap that magnet on your harddisk.

What OS are you going to reinstall, because I know that on XP you don't need a startup disk. Instead you boot from the CD-ROM and it contains a wizard to create/remove partitions and format.

well, there are some people that dont use xp yet right? besides using fdisk or partition pro bootup disk if he have will be easier. I dont know I havent tried xp yet.

magnets... hahahaha.

xp has fdisk or something like it built in, so that's all you'll need.

how big is your hard drive? b/c if its less than 22.4 gigs, then you can use ibm's wipe utility (which fits on a floppy) to do a complete low level format (resets your hard drive to all 0's) it also drops the assignments for bad sectors....

dont worry... i actually fixed this a long time ago.... sorry to have kept the thread going.... everything worked out.. thanks anyways..