[RESOLVED] Formatting without DVD/CD

[Lord Orwell]

You can install it from a USB stick. For Vista/W7 you will need one with at least 4GB.

Regarding formating, you have a free partition manager called GParted which can be burnt on a CD/DVD and booted, or booted from a USB flash. From there you can do what you want with the hard drives. I usually prefer to do that first and prepare partitions for Windows, then install it cleanly.

i just went through this putting xp on a netbook. I now am glad i have that usb floppy drive. Booting from a flash drive for install convinced xp that the drive was the boot drive and it put the boot sector on it. It also prevented fdisk from making the primary partition of the hard drive active. I had to boot from the floppy and then run it.

It sounds to me like there are two options:

1. He only borrowed the setup dvd from someone (not buying it) in which case it would be illegal for him to copy it.

2. The drivers for the hardware aren't available or won't install on his machine.

even if it was illegal to copy it, that doesn't copy protect the disk. He should still be able to do it.

I had that happen to my previous burner, but I used the hell out of it. Written about 1500 DVD with it, at the end it started making problems, errors during write, or even if it written it it had problems reading them. First gave up on DVD-R but +R continued some, then those gave away too. Still, it was able to read both CDs and DVDs and write only CDs.

i was wondering if he ever got any disks from that stack to ever work in any burner? It could be a speed issue. My dad was burning x4 disks at x16 and that drive would actually read them but no others would.
Finally i had this exact same problem in vista's built-in burner. it would crap out at the end of the burn. Make sure your burning program has overrun protection and i recommend iso burner. It's free.

[baja_yu]

Good info on using USBs to install. I never installed XP from it. It would have taken me some time to figure out that could be the problem.

I use Nero for burning, buffer underrun is always on so that's not a problem. Speed either, I tried every combination, it just gave up on DVDs, couldn't read them in either 4 system I had access to at the time so I scrapped them. Buying a new burner however, fixed the problem instantly.

[FireXtol]

There are distributions of Linux designed to fit on a USB drive, and are bootable. Not installations, but functional OS. Some offer(even specialize) in disk utilities, such as partitioning and formatting, among numerous others.

There are also many Live CDs. I believe Ubuntu still sends out free Live CDs upon request.

Links:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
http://partedmagic.com/

[Lord Orwell]

There are distributions of Linux designed to fit on a USB drive, and are bootable. Not installations, but functional OS. Some offer(even specialize) in disk utilities, such as partitioning and formatting, among numerous others.

There are also many Live CDs. I believe Ubuntu still sends out free Live CDs upon request.

Links:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
http://partedmagic.com/

and adding to that, i personally know that ubuntu and one of those distros for older computers (not puppy but i forget the name) actually come with usb installers to make a bootable usb from the live cd complete with a persistant partition for data.