Trouble in FDISK

fubarman · Post by **fubarman** » Sat May 22, 2004 3:52 pm

well, i have my one HD hooked up and the other w/ no power or IDE cable. It says in FDISK that i have an ext Dos partition which is using 100% of the drive. I cannot delete this partiton no matter which options i select in FDISK. I can create and delete new primary DOS partitions but i cannot seem to delete this ext partition. Does anyone have any idea? O, what I'm trying to do is get my computer back up and running (I have no OS installed now) and I do have 2 HD's. The other has caused me some problems so i decided to just look at the drive which the windows installer automatically defaults too. Thanks

fubarman · Post by **fubarman** » Sat May 22, 2004 4:11 pm

Alright, i just connected both HD's again. When i do this i can go into FDISK and there is a 5th option which is Change current fixed disk drive and then goes into a screen which displays:

disk drv Mbytes free usage
1 59661 100%

C: 59661
2 59661 8 100%
59653

All I want to do is format both drives however when i try to format the 2nd HD (D) it says that it cannot be performed because it isn't supported on that drive. I just want to get windows back on this computer but I'm having a hell of a time doing that. Any help would be great, thanks. sorry bout the table, it's a lil screwed up . . . the only drive it shows is C: and the 8 is across from disk 2 under free.

i found that there is an ext DOS partition in the 2nd HD which will not be deleted and it is set active somehow. How do i erase this partition?

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Sat May 22, 2004 4:59 pm

I think you have to delete all the "logical dos drives" in the "extended dos partition" before you can delete the "extended dos partition"

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Sat May 22, 2004 5:58 pm

I like to run the DOS command wipe 0 or 1 on a disk I'm having problems with. That cleans off all partitions right down to a raw disk in need of formatting.

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Sat May 22, 2004 6:24 pm

MadDoctor wrote:I like to run the DOS command wipe 0 or 1 on a disk I'm having problems with. That cleans off all partitions right down to a raw disk in need of formatting.

Yeah I have two three utilities that will do that, maxblast etc. They'll get the job done if your in a pinch. Only thing is I find they take forever to clean a large disk. I usually delete stubborn partitions with delpart.

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Sun May 23, 2004 1:05 am

The Dude wrote:I find they take forever to clean a large disk.

All my wife lets me buy are 10 GB hard drives (I have a porno problem)

A 10 GB hard drive only take about 10 minutes to wipe. A 40 GB takes about 15 minutes. Not bad.

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Sun May 23, 2004 10:58 am

[quote="MadDoctor"](I have a porno problem) ]
Ah, OK, I can see why you would want to use that utility.

The last time I used one was to clean the drives on systems at work that were going up for auction. It wrote each drive with 1's and then 0's and repeated that 3 times. It was federal government so they had to be wiped to RCMP standards. That took a long time, hours to do a 2g drive. Of course the difference here is it's intended to make sure there is nothing readable left on the drive versus making the drive readable. I have used the drive prep utilities and it took about the same time you mentioned which isn't bad.