Simple/not so simple harddisk question

[Gustavus]

This should be simple. My network computer has four hard drives. The C drive and an archive drive are 160Gig Seagates (master and slave on one IDE connector) I have two older 80Gig Maxtors that I use for file storage called Library M and Library N. They are master and slave on the seconf IDE connector. All have worked reliably for ever. I recently cleared out the old files on one of these (saving some to the other library drive and deleting most since they were very old and of no possible interest any more) There were two files on the drive I could not delete; System Volume Information (about 2GIG!) and the Recycler folder. Fine, I thought, I will just reformat the drive (NTFS) and start with a clean format. No matter what I do though I cannot format the drive. I have even tried third party software, but always get an error box saying the drive is in use etc. It is not in use.

I haven't tried from safe mode yet since I would like to know what is going on. Anyone have any ideas? There are only those two files on the drive that can't be deleted and the drive cannot be formatted to get rid of them.

 

[RebateMonger]

System Volume Infomation is a folder that contains the System Restore points. If you double-click on it, can you open the folder? If not, then you have insufficient permission to delete it. If this is a "foreign" disk (from another PC), then you likely have limited permissions.

Windows XP will automatically re-create a deleted System Volume Information folder when it's deleted from the System drive. I'm not sure what happens when it's deleted from a non-system drive. I only have one drive on my main XP box right now.

Usenet search result containing information on deleting System Volume Information.

I'm not sure why you can't reformat the drive. Can you delete all the partitions on it using the Disk Management panel?

 

[Gustavus]

RebateMonger

First I have finally succeeded in formatting the drive. Thanks for responding to my query. What I did sounds like it is related to what you were thinking. I opened compmgmt.msc in run and then opened disk management (just as you were thinking). That opens a display of each of the drives (hard and optical) on the computer. Surprisingly I was able to format the drive from there. I can not understand why that was any different than formatting by opening the drive in My computer and selecting format or trying to format with third part disk management software. But at least the problem is solved and the disk now has no files on it.