The solution below erases all information from the hard drive but allows the computer to be formatted and removes the drive’s compression.

  • Boot from a bootable floppy diskette containing the fdisk file. For additional information about creating a bootable diskette, see our boot disk guide.
  • Run fdisk once at the DOS prompt.
  • In fdisk, delete the primary partition and all partitions on the computer.
  • Once deleted, reboot the computer again with the bootable floppy diskette.
  • Run fdisk again once at the DOS prompt.
  • Recreate the primary partition.

Once the partition is removed and then recreated, run the format command and reinstall your operating system.

  • How to erase my hard drive and start over?
  • Hard drive help and support.