Trouble reformatting drive because of old boot sector

[Heliskier59]

I have a three HD system and reinstalled the xp pro OS on a different hard drive...Now I cannot reformat the old boot drive because xp sees the old boot sector on the drive...I installed xp on the scsi HD with the old eide drives disconnected and I don't need them connected to boot up. I had some data on the old eide c drive that I wanted to keep I just didn't think that the new OS install would look at the old boot sector and keep me from reformatting that drive. The scsi drive (OS) IS recognized as C..even with the old eide drives reattached...Do I need to do this from the command prompt or is there some other way to overide the xp pro OS to let me do this from the console? Thanks!!!

 

[jlbenedict]

the best approach to this would have been during your Windows XP installl, during the partition setup, you could have chose to delete the other hard disks partitions, and then continued on with the install on the partition that you chose to install to..
Then Windows would have recognized the other two drives as not paritioned, then you would have been able to set up the disks and format them using Disk Management

 

[Heliskier59]

True, however I had data on the old boot drive that I needed to keep....this was not a planned re-install...I crashed the drive with a bad bios update. I suppose I could disconnect the drive with the new os and then delete the partions on the old c drive using windows xp install cd as if I were reinstalling xp....I was hoping there would be an easier way...

 

[Heliskier59]

Well...That's what I did and it worked...booted up on the xp CD after disconnecting the drive with the new OS and deleting the partion on the drive with the old OS...