Hey, I'm trying to reformat a hard drive. I've done this dozens of times, and I always just go through the recovery console, select the drive and reformat. Well after you select the drive, it asks for the administrator password. This computer has no administrator password, so I pressed "enter" like I always do, and it says it's an invalid password. I've tried everything I can think of, but nothing works. I've logged into the administrator account and verified that there's no password.
Any ideas about what's going on?
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
Has anyone else had access to this computer besides you?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Why not just not use the Recovery Console? Boot to a boot disk (or the install CD), FDISK if you want, and then format from the install CD.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
Hehe. FDisk and good old DOS format respect no boundaries.
Which is probably why I still use them for formatting, when appropriate.
Posted by Speed (Member # 5162) on :
Thanks for the help. Sorry I couldn't respond... I was reformatting for someone else, at their house, and it got really tricky getting on line after a while. I'm scared of DOS, so I just deleted the partitions and created a new one. It was really strange, though. I tried three times to do a regular format, and it'd get 99% of the way done, then just sit there for five minutes and finally tell me that the drive was damaged. I thought I'd have to break the news to them that their computer was broken, which really sucked. Then just before I left I decided to try the quick format, which I'd never done and never intended to do. But for some reason, that worked with absolutely no problem.
I'm still puzzled. I'm glad it worked, but it was the weirdest reformat I'd ever done. Maybe if I had any idea what the hell I was doing, it would make more sense. But alas...
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I would run a CHKDSK immediately, from what you've said.
Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :
![[Smile]](smile.gif)