Accessing dos before a complete boot up

[dragonfly522]

I want to format my hard drive more than once, so it would be easier to do this in a command prompt outside of windows. I think that I may have bad sectors or corrupted files. Does anyone know how to access DOS outside of Windows?

 

[Ijack]

You'll need to boot from a DOS floppy (or CD). Alternatively you could use something like GParted Live.

 

[dragonfly522]

Does a Windows upgrade CD have DOS? Also, can GParted Live be used outside of Windows? I know that this might be a silly question.

 

[Ijack]

Windows CDs don't contain DOS, as such. They do contain something called the Recovery Console, but I'm not sure that it would be suitable for what you want to do.

GParted Live is an ISO file that you make a bootable CD from (Google it and have a look at the web site). You boot from this CD and it doesn't depend upon any OS being present on the hard drive. You can use it to do various partitioning and formatting tasks. There are similar commercial offerings, e.g. Partition Magic or Paragon Disk Manager, but GParted is Open Source and is free.

 

[ricno]

I want to format my hard drive more than once, so it would be easier to do this in a command prompt outside of windows. I think that I may have bad sectors or corrupted files. Does anyone know how to access DOS outside of Windows?

What do you really want to do? Is Windows itself installed on the drive you want to format multiple times?

There is command line tools for both doing formating and checking for disk errors already included in Windows. Try for example chkdsk and format in the Command Prompt.

And what is by the way the reason for the multiple formats?

 

[dragonfly522]

What do you really want to do? Is Windows itself installed on the drive you want to format multiple times?

There is command line tools for both doing formating and checking for disk errors already included in Windows. Try for example chkdsk and format in the Command Prompt.

And what is by the way the reason for the multiple formats?

Hi ricno, thanks for the response. I was told that if I am overclocking, the hard disk files can become corrupted if I overclock too much and that by formatting the HDD 5-6 times I can get rid of those corrupted files.

 

[ricno]

that by formatting the HDD 5-6 times I can get rid of those corrupted files.

I think either there is some misunderstanding or that someone told you a lie. It is not correct at all.