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reformatting

I have a packard bell 75 pentium 1 gig hard drive.. I originally had win3.11 on it, upgraded to Win95 2 years ago. I want to wipe the drive clean and start again. I have done it before.. no big deal, but this time I get an error message.. it says, "write protect error writing Drive A. then it gives me the option of Abort,Retry or Fail?? I am at a loss here.. any ideas?

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achopra

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manti

ASKER

ok.. I am still a beginner in alot of ways in this, I am going by what info I got from packard bell.. they sent a floppy and a cdrom.. told me to reboot with both of them in.. then follow instructions.. doesn't say anything about making a new floppy? so I am not sure what you are telling me here..

jboddy

The disk has a little slider on the under side, which opens / covers a hole, which is the write protect hole. If you can see two hole through the disk (about 5mm - 1/8th inch square), it is write protected, so you have to slide the slider to cover the second small hole. You should then be able to write to the disk.

If you are trying to format your hard disk, it should not be trying to write to your floppy disk and your command may be wrong. It should be (at the 'a:>' prompt)'format c: /u/s', as achopra said.
Then follow the instructions from packard bell after the format has completed.
(Sorry if this repeats the earlier statements, but felt it was necessary)