Want to completely reformat 60 GB drive

[Muse]

I don't see a way to do this within XP Pro. The drive has 7 or so partitions including FAT, FAT32 and NTFS.

I can reformat a partition, but I see no way to format the whole drive and repartition it. Do I need to go back to 1990 and use a DOS floppy with format.com and fdisk?

 

[doan]

If its your boot drive, boot from your XP CD then delete all the partitions and format.

If its not your boot drive, from within windows right-click on my computer and select manage, then select Disk Management. Right-click on partitions to delete, etc...

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: doan
If its your boot drive, boot from your XP CD then delete all the partitions and format.

If its not your boot drive, from within windows right-click on my computer and select manage, then select Disk Management. Right-click on partitions to delete, etc...

Thanks. I didn't see that. I used Partition Magic instead. It worked out OK. A lot of hardware stuff today. Tomorrow, I install 3 OS's on the box, etc.

It was actually my boot drive. I installed it in my other PC to change the way the drive was partitioned.

 

[Muse]

I think the drive may be screwed up. I thought I'd deleted all the partitions and repartitioned it like this:

FAT32 3 GB
NTFS 6 GB
NTFS 23 GB
NTFS 27 GB


But it appears that the original 1 GB FAT partition at the beginning of the drive was never deleted and my Windows 2000 install disk says it's either unpartitioned or damaged! :Q

 

[Muse]

Thinking about it I have another perspective on the problem. The 1 GB boot partition (FAT) on this drive was 99% full and served as the boot partition for all the OS's:

Win98SE 2nd
WinNT 4
Win2000

The paging file for all the OS's was the one paging file on this partition and this accounted for almost all the space. I think that this somehow screwed up the drive or at least made it so that a lot of the time the drive was not seen in the BIOS, and the fact that Partition Magic 7's Quick Format of the drive (delete partitions, repartition that I did yesterday) somehow failed. The other partitions may be there, it seems (FAT32, 3 NTFS partitions), but the 1 GB boot partition is still there but unknown file system or damaged, according to the Win2000 install CD.

 

[Brazen]

If you really want to go hardcore and wipe the drive back to fresh-off-the-press blankness, then boot to a linux LiveCD (I like GParted LiveCD for things like this) and run this at the command line:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

This will set every single bit on the disk to zero. Wipes out the mbr, partition table, everything. The /dev/hda is assuming this is the first IDE drive, if the drive is SATA or SCSI then it will be /dev/sdX (X being some letter).

 

[redbeard1]

This program makes a bootable cd and erases everything on it. While you may not need a secure wipe, it gets rid of all partitions and data.

DBAN

 

[Throckmorton]

Just do a regular format. You need to delete all the partitions first from the Administrative Tools, and then create the new ones, and don't do quick format. Slow will scan the drive for errors.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Throckmorton
Just do a regular format. You need to delete all the partitions first from the Administrative Tools, and then create the new ones, and don't do quick format. Slow will scan the drive for errors.

This is what I'm doing (but with a different, an 80 GB drive... read on). At first I did a quick format. I think that was a mistake. Could be that the first partition, 1 GB FAT, which had the pagefile used by all 3 OSs and was 99% full ( ! ) was corrupted and/or a problem for the PC at bootup. Anyway, having larger drives on my shelf (i.e. 80 GB), I decided to just use one of those instead. I deleted all the partitions on this 60 GB and did a slow format using Disk Management in XP Pro, NTFS and put it on the shelf.

At first I partitioned the 80 GB drive with the first partition 3 GB and FAT32, also the last of four partitions around 32 GB FAT32, the other 2 partitions NTFS (for OSs). I tried to install Win98SE on the first partition but got a message that it had to reformat the partition. I let it and after a while came back and it said that it couldn't format the partition and it asked me to quit setup! I did, and found myself at DOS prompt. I entered Setup and pressed Enter and Win98 setup proceeded. To my surprise at the end I found out that Win98 had installed itself on the 4th 32 GB partition! Figuring it would never work after installing Win2000 and XP Pro on the 2nd and 3rd partitions, I decided "screw it," I'm not going to bother with Win98SE! 😕