Hey everyone,

Right now, I've decided my computer needs a clean slate and I've never ran into this problem before in dealing with formatting my computer, but I have come across this problem when I formatted my friends windows xp.

When I go to the recovery console, I type in FORMAT C: /FS:FAT32 to do a complete format, but the next line gives me "AUTOFMT.EXE could not be located in either the startup directory or the CDROM drive."

I remember fixing this problem, but I forgot how I did it before. Help is appreciated. Thank you.

I might've found it on this site

http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/WTC.htm under
Windows 2000/XP OS Boot Record
First Sector and “Bootstrap” Code

I will give it a try then reply again

You might also investigate a tool called xxClone

It has a category called "cool tools" in which one choice is to make a disk bootable and/or repair the MBR...I think by using available MBR data. Not sure my memory is 100% on that, but you might look into it.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCLONE_d5534.html
http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm
http://www.xxclone.com/idwnload.htm

Francis basco said: Why not just format in the Windows setup? No need to go to recovery console.

Oh. I never knew you could do that.. I use this site as a reference whenever I format:

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm

But anyway, I got it to work from that website in the 2nd post to this thread. Thank you for your help people!

Actually lol I really did know.. I found out on the way to installing a fresh copy of Win XP. It's the thing that takes about 30 minutes. My badddd