Hard drive formatting problem!

[deanos63]

Hi all,

I have 2 hard drives installed on my PC.

My pc has just come back from repair, and my computer boots off my primary hard drive fine, i wanted to format my secondary hard drive because it had nothing but crap on it and so i wanted to start with a fresh one.

This is what i did, i disconnected my primary hard drive then booted up my PC using the secondary hard drive (which now turned into a primary hard drive). I put my boot cd that came with my machine in and started my PC it said do i want to format the hard drive so i can reinstall windows blah blah blah. i hit yes, it formats it ok, but it installed windows XP again on to my secondary hard drive.

So i plug my primary back in and have it how it was before, i go to my computer and try to format the second hard drive from there, but it says it can't becuase it is occupied. I take it this is because windows xp has been installed on it!

All i want to do is format and wipe clean my secondary hard drive! I can't do it within windows, how else can i do it? (without having windows install itself again!)

cheers all!

 

[JoshSB]

You can do it from windows if windows is not being booted from your secondary Hard drive. Are they SATA? and if they are IDE you have secondary set as a slave, not master right?

 

[deanos63]

yeah thats right my secondary is set as a slave.

but thats my point, i right click on the secondary drive in windows and click on format, but it says:

" Windows cannot format the drive. Quit any disk utilites or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure no windows is displaying the contents of the drive. Then try formatting again"

But the only thing on it is windows xp, and my primary HD isn't using that disk at all cuz i have unplugged it and my computer runs like normal.

 

[deanos63]

someone please help!

is there not a standard boot disc i can make to wipe the hard drive on boot up?

 

[harley3344]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
partition tools are awsome. use nero to burn a copy of the iso. use one of the partition tools to reformat, but just to be safe take out ur primary (one with windows) hd so that you dont format the wrong one . which is what u did in the first place.