Hard drive partitioning problems. :(

[jcwagers]

Ok....here's the story. I have my friend's computer here at my house(he never uses it). It was going to be used earlier tonight and it had a corrupt file. I decided that this would be a PERFECT time to try XP. That didn't quite pan out and so I tried Win2k. That also didn't quite pan out so I was just goofing around and decided to try Mandrake 8.2. And.....much like the other two OS's I didn't have enough room(the computer only has a 1 gig drive). So.....I decided Mandrake wouldn't work and I'd just put Win98 back on. Well, I put in the Win98 boot disk and after loading the tools.....it told me that it wasn't a FAT partition. I went in and used Fdisk to delete the non-dos partition. This is where the problem starts. I set up a primary partition but it was only about 500 megs of the drive. The other 500 megs was on an extended logical drive. I can't get rid of the logical drive or the extended partition. It won't let me do anything. When I go to delete the extended partition, it tells me that it can't delete an extended partition when there are logical drives. When I go to delete the logical drive, it doesn't show a logical drive. I would like to put the entire partition(of a whopping 1 gig) into one drive so I can put Win98 back on. I haven't had any success getting rid of the logical drives or the extended partition......especially now that I have the primary partition. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks in advance!

jc

 

[compudog]

Try running SpinRite to completely clean the drive and then set your partitions.

 

[Kwatt]

I had the same problem with a SUSE,Red Hat, and Mandrake atempt a couple of years ago on a 1.5 Gig drive. I never was able to get either to install. (without "insufficent HD space" errors) And they call Windows bloatwear!

What I finally did was boot from my Win NT CD and tell NT to format the entire disk in 1 partition with FAT32.
When NT was done formatting the disk. I shut the computer off and then rebooted with WIN 95 boot disk. Was able to install WIN 95 from there.

I don't know if this will help because I have never tried an 2K,XP or 98 install. If you have a NT disk give it a try.



Good Luck

Kwatt



EDIT: <Spelling>

 

[PCHPlayer]

Most hard drive manufacturers have tools that will completely wipe out a drive. Just search the websites. I've never used SpinRite, but it may do the same thing that the manufacturers tools do.