peacemaker1ps

Senior member
Dec 29, 2002
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ok heres the deal. im trying to format my harddrive,
right now i have win98 and win 2000 running in one harddrive,
theres 2 partition c: (2gigs) and d: (58gigs) , c: is primary partition and im running win 98 and d: is extended partition and running with 2000 pro, i tried fdsik and everything to format hardrive and i just cant format extended partition, all i can do is format primary drive which is c: anyone have any idea how to get rid of partion and format d: i cant figure this out, =/
edit- by the way im trying to go back my os to win 98 se
and when i put win 98se cd , it automatically format c: only , not d:

 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
9,558
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DOS (and Win98) will not recognize an NTFS formatted partition, which is most likely what your D drive is. The version of FDISK that is part of Win98 won't be able to remove an NTFS partition at all (why Microsoft couldn't release a patch for that, I don't know, I think mainly because they don't want anybody using NTFS to stop using an NT-based operating system so they make it as hard as possible).

There are several ways to fix it. First thing you should do is make sure you have no files left on the Windows2000 partition that you want (copy them to the C drive if you want to keep anything.) Then create a Windows98 Startup Disk in Win98. Then boot to that disk, and once it's booted and at the command prompt, type sys c:. That will remove the bootup sequence and boot record that causes the system to recognize Windows2000 as an installed OS.

This page can explain further. I don't like the way he doesn't mention ahead of time that you will need to have a Windows98 boot disk available. He also explains which files you need to remove from the C drive to finish the uninstall.
 

compudog

Diamond Member
Apr 25, 2001
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Try bootdisk.com for tons of info. You should be able to delete the extended (non-DOS) partition with fdisk. Then format the whole drive as one volume. It may depend on the version of FDISK you are running.
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
9,558
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As I said, the version of fdisk with Win98 cannot delete NTFS partitions. Microsoft says so. Their solution is to use whatever third party utility you used to create the partition, which is kinda stupid when you're trying to get rid of the operating system that created the partition and you can't delete the partition while you're in the OS.