Cannot reformat
- Thread starter Spud5437
- Start date
- Status
Spud, you CANNOT reformat a hard drive while booted up in Windows if you are trying to reformat the active partition.
EDIT: I read your other posting. Let me try to make this clear for you. Let's say you have a 20 GB HDD. If that HDD is all one single partition and you are trying to reformat it, you cannot do it while booted up in Windows; in essense you're telling windows to delete itself! You simply cannot do that. However, if that hard drive is partitioned into 3 partitions; say Primary is 10 GB with two logical partitions of 5 GB each, then your Primary will become the C: drive with letters D: and E: for the logical. If yiou are booted up in windows, you can reformat D or E - but you CANNOT format C:\ drive. I hope this makes sense for you now.
EDIT: I read your other posting. Let me try to make this clear for you. Let's say you have a 20 GB HDD. If that HDD is all one single partition and you are trying to reformat it, you cannot do it while booted up in Windows; in essense you're telling windows to delete itself! You simply cannot do that. However, if that hard drive is partitioned into 3 partitions; say Primary is 10 GB with two logical partitions of 5 GB each, then your Primary will become the C: drive with letters D: and E: for the logical. If yiou are booted up in windows, you can reformat D or E - but you CANNOT format C:\ drive. I hope this makes sense for you now.
Hey man, you can format your drive without multiple partitions. All you need is a Windows 98 startup disk. Tell it to boot into DOS mode and use the command: format c:
This should format your drive successfully. Lone Wolf your help only applies to someone who in fact does not want to format their main partition. And yea, you can't format the main windows partition while it's still running.
BEWARE: ALL FILES WILL BE LOST, INCLUDING YOUR WINDOWS INSTALLATION. You will need to reinstall windows following the format of the main windows partition.
There are also easier ways in providence of software. Partition Magic can perform many amazing things with a hard drive reguarding partitions, but if your only going to format, just use a windows 98 startup disk and save some cash. If you have XP you can't make one your-self, as a new add/remove programs system was developed without it's oddly placed Startup Disk creation utility, however, you can find various places to download the files manually.
You can also use your NT/2000/XP installation cd to format your drive. There are many options and possibilities, and it's your job to explore them. My favorite and more appreciated format method is with the startup disk.
This should format your drive successfully. Lone Wolf your help only applies to someone who in fact does not want to format their main partition. And yea, you can't format the main windows partition while it's still running.
BEWARE: ALL FILES WILL BE LOST, INCLUDING YOUR WINDOWS INSTALLATION. You will need to reinstall windows following the format of the main windows partition.
There are also easier ways in providence of software. Partition Magic can perform many amazing things with a hard drive reguarding partitions, but if your only going to format, just use a windows 98 startup disk and save some cash. If you have XP you can't make one your-self, as a new add/remove programs system was developed without it's oddly placed Startup Disk creation utility, however, you can find various places to download the files manually.
You can also use your NT/2000/XP installation cd to format your drive. There are many options and possibilities, and it's your job to explore them. My favorite and more appreciated format method is with the startup disk.
mdshort said:
Good god....Why dont' you learn how to read a posting man.
I know you don't need multiple partitions to format a disk - no where in my posting did i say so.
mdshort said:
No sh*t sherlock.....Exactly the point i was trying to make. It sounded like to me Spud was trying to format his active partition while booted up in Windows - so i was just trying to illustrate that he couldn't do that unless he was trying to format a partition OTHER than the active one.
mdshort said:
Yeah...nothing like a little redundancy huh?
- Status
