format hard drive using external floppy

[Brian]

I plan to donate my old pc with win98 installed. the
internal floppy drive is damaged. I have an exterbnal USB
floppy connected that works but I can't figure out how to
configure it to run the startup disk boot program I
created on a diff pc. This will allow me to run the
format when I get into DOS and at the A: prompt. Am I
able to do this with windows running?

thks

[Noel Paton]

1) you can't format the drive from which the system booted
2) your motherboard has to support booting from an external device for you
to be able to boot from a USB-floppy - and most older boards (and a lot of
newer ones!) don't support that option.

with the price of floppy drives down at around 5-10 dollars/pounds, it's
cheap enough to replace the floppy drive and give the new owner a
fully-functional PC.

--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2005, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.btinternet.com/~winnoel/millsrpch.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm on how to post messages to NG's

"Brian" > wrote in message
...
>I plan to donate my old pc with win98 installed. the
> internal floppy drive is damaged. I have an exterbnal USB
> floppy connected that works but I can't figure out how to
> configure it to run the startup disk boot program I
> created on a diff pc. This will allow me to run the
> format when I get into DOS and at the A: prompt. Am I
> able to do this with windows running?
>
> thks
>