Formatting a hard drive with an OS on it

[stipalgl]

Hey there, I'm a bit baffled as to what to exactly do here. Here's the situation.

I had a Samsung 1TB hard drive being used as an OS which also contained lots of data on it. I just recently purchased a Caviar Black 1TB and installed Windows 7 on it, effectively making it my primary drive.

Now the Samsung still contains my files and Vista but I only wish for it to be a storage drive. I've moved all the important files to a third drive temporarily and wish to format it, erasing it of all its Vista contents. The problem is I can't seem to be able to do so as I keep getting the messages "Windows was unable to format this drive" when attempting it.

If anyone can help me out and provide some information I'm missing, it would be much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Elixer]

Just where do you see that message, in device manager?

Open up a command window, type chkdsk d: /x /v (assuming d: is the samsung) and it should unmount it, and check it.
Once done, you should be able to format it. If it can't unmount it, then you need to find out why. Most likely the pagefile is now on that drive, or something along those lines.

 

[stipalgl]

I'm unable to format in two areas:

-Under "Computer" when right clicking on the drive and selecting format, I'm unable to do so.

-Under "Disk Management" in the control panel, when I attempt to format it, I get a message saying "Windows cannot format the system partition on this disk".

The fact that the OS is on there is preventing it from happening I understand.

Additionally, I did what you specified and it unmounted the drive but unless I did something wrong, I'm still unable to format it.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Download that, burn the image to CD or put it on a USB drive, turn off your system, disconnect all hard drives except the Samsung (to prevent stupid mistakes!), turn the system back on (with the gparted boot disk inserted), then follow the instructions. It's a pretty straightforward interface so you shouldn't have any trouble figuring out what to do.

When I formatted a drive that had Windows 7 on it (to make room for storage just like you're doing), I deleted all of the partitions on the disk. I then hooked up my normal boot drive, went back into Disk Management, & created the partition/formatted it from there. You can create an empty, formatted partition in gparted but like me, you're probably already familiar with how to do that in Windows Disk Management. HTH.

 

[stipalgl]

Thanks for the help Gigant, but I have a question.

Is there really no way to actually do this simply through Windows 7? Seems baffling to me that something which should be so simple actually requires a third party program in order to be carried out.

 

[Nothinman]

The Samsung is probably the initial boot drive and contains the Windows boot files so if you format that you won't be able to boot.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Originally posted by: stipalgl
Thanks for the help Gigant, but I have a question.

Is there really no way to actually do this simply through Windows 7? Seems baffling to me that something which should be so simple actually requires a third party program in order to be carried out.

If there is, I didn't find it before I found gparted, haha. There comes a point when a less efficient solution is better because by the time you find the more efficient solution, you could've already solved the problem less efficiently twice.

 

[Blain]

Did you try deleting the partition...
Creating a new partition...
Then try to foramt the drive?

 

[stipalgl]

I had to use Gigant's method to format the drive. I simply couldn't delete the partition through Windows or command prompt.

Regardless, the issue has now been solved.

Thanks for the help.

 

[abaez]

I had this issue before where I was trying to delete an old Vista install and the new Vista simply would not let me format because it was seeing system files or whatever. I simply booted into a command prompt via usb stick and smacked down that bitch with a format d: /q.

 

[RebateMonger]

MS' DiskPart command line program will pretty much let you do what you want to a disk.