Is there anyway one could format a SATA drive in DOS prompt. What I mean is boot the computer with a Windows 98 boot floppy and access the drive with a drive letter.

I've tried this but unable to access any drives. I've got two SATA and two IDE drives in my system.

Any help would be appreciated. This is very useful to re-image a back up of a drive in the event of a crash. I've done a back up using Norton GHOST.

Depends how you formatted the drives previously - if they're formatted FAT/FAT32, you shouldn't have problems accessing them from the Command Line. If they're not accessible, then you likely formatted NTFS and the only way to access them then would be the use of something like NTFS4DOS, which allows you to mount NTFS partitions from a DOS environment. Unfortunately, NTFS4DOS is shareware and the free version only allows read access, not write.

What you may want to do is format one of your image backup drive with FAT32 partition and use this as your primary image backup files. You can then run NTFS4DOS (freeware readonly version) after booting DOS on floppy and run Ghost to backup your NTFS drive.

If your version of Ghost still cannot see the NTFS partition, you may want to upgrade or check other image backup software. I think the newer version of Ghost or Driver Image can do NTFS image backup without a problem. You can also checkout an drive image backup I am using Drive Snapshot. The beauty with Drive Snapshot is you can backup a drive within XP without the need to reboot to DOS. A trial 30 days copy can be downloaded.

The only downside I've found to Ghost is that while it can typically read NTFS partitions, it doesn't work with all controllers out there. On my IC7-G, it would read the ICH5 drives fine, but had issues with anything on the Silicon Image (or maybe the controllers were switched - either way Ghost would only read one of the controllers drives).