Reformatting

Logan1

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my laptop won't let me reformat my hard drive. tells me volume is in use by another process. then it asks if i want to force a dismount. whether i hit yes or no it says the same thing. "cannot lock the drive. the volume is still in use." i need to do this and soon. advice and help much appreciated. thanks.
 
what??
if you mean in the MS-Dos promt that is where i am doing it. i found out that the OS is on the drive i want to format so i need to boot from a disk before i can format it. but i do not have a boot disk and i can't make one because i have do not have a floppy drive. i have tried creating a boot cd but my computer refuses to boot from a cd. even from the linux cd i have, even though i set my cd-rom to my primary master in BIOS. Please help me i'm at my wits end.
 
:confused: Primary master in BIOS? Huh? It needs to be set as the first boot device in the boot order- and it should be the primary on the secondary IDE. You have 2 problems then- you can't boot from CD, and you don't have a floppy drive. I have to think more about this, to see what is possible.....

Can you boot from USB? Some computers have an option in BIOS to boot from USB Device- you could put the boot up info there, if your BIOS will see it.
 
not sure if i can boot from USB. but i don't think so. oddly enough my first boot device is my non-existant floppy, second is cdrom and third is hard drive. nothing seems to help. i have a virus that periodically crashes my comp that i can't get rid of. trying to reformat and switch to linux. just giving some background.
 
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