Trying to format a hdd
Community Forums/General Help/Trying to format a hdd
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| Hi there. I've got an old Acer laptop which is now scrap so I thought I'd save the one bit of it which is worth keeping - the HDD and get a HDD caddy and use it as an external 40gb drive. I've been trying to format it without success. I've deleted the partition between C and the logical drive D but I can't format C because Acer install a hidden 3GB partition on C drive for their recovery system. Anyone know how to format this drive so I end up with 40GB? Would it be easier to do it as an external drive rather than from within the laptop? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. |
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| Burn a Knoppix CD ( http://www.knoppix.net/ ) and remove all partitions with GParted. Partitions are sometimes made in some wierd way, so that Windows can't remove them, but Linux can always. |
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| What OS are you using? From WinXP: 1. Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management. 2. Once in Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management. 3. In the upper window click on the appropriate hard-drive. 4. In the lower window right click on the partition you want to delete, delete it. Then delete all other partitions. 5. Once you get rid of all the partitions, create a new partition, then format. These aren't exactly the full steps, but it should be enough to get your task accomplished. If you have trouble, report back and we can offer further advice. DOS: Use Fdisk Windows Vista/7: More or less the same as XP. :D [Edit] P.S. Once you get the drive formatted, since it's old, you should run a complete disk check for bad blocks/sectors. You may find that it's not as reliable as you'd wish. |
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| Thanks for your help. It's XP and I've done the computer management, storage, disk management steps which worked fine with D which is now unallocated but I'm left with 2 sections - one labelled PQ service which is the restore system and the other labelled C. The problem is that if I right click on the C part the delete partition command and the format command are both greyed out. Right clicking on the PQ section simply gives me one option Help which doesn't. I'll try GParted. Thanks |
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| Any linux live CD will remove this (if you are 100% sure you want to). Windows will not allow you to remove an EISA partition (not without 3rd party tools). |
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| Yeah, but Knoppix is optimized to be a Live CD only, and it has tons of disk tools packed on it. |
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| The problem is that if I right click on the C part the delete partition command and the format command are both greyed out You can't delete or format your active c:\ partition if that is the one your OS itself is running from at the time... |
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| Get an external HD enclosure, put the drive in, format it. Seriously - Knoppix utterly stinks, even for Linux. |
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| if you have it installed in a computer as the main drive you can use a windows xp(I don't know if you can do it in vista or 7) installation cd to remove and create partitions. if you don't want to install the operating system just stop the installation after partitioning and/or formating. [edit] in some cases you have to make sure you have WIndows XP installation cd with service pack 3 integrated for SATA drives. |
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| You cannot use the windows CD nor do it in comp management. It is a "special" partition. (not with vista or 7 anyway, -not sure about XP... that is if it can even identify the disk :D) You can use either (afaik) -a linux CD (ubuntu/debian/fedora/redhat/knopoix/DSL liveCDs or sticks can do it) -a great toolkit called UBCD (ultimate boot cd) -if you can get a copy of winternals that might get rid of it too (never done it with this tho). |
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| Many thanks for all the advice. I looked at the linux program and decided not to. Then I repartioned D and then used the restore program to format C and reinstall Windows with the idea of removing any ancillary programs and then removing windows when it was an external drive. When the restoration had finished I noticed that the computer which had continually overheated for ages - one of the reasons for scrapping it - together with an optical drive that doesn't work, sound ports that don't work and several lines down the screen - was running very quietly with the fans hardly working at all. It makes me wonder whether the overheating was caused by a program which has now been deleted. Regards. |
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| I guess we'll never know. |
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| Could have been MSN or Firefox actually, on my windows machine i have had a few occasions of wtf!, brought up the sysmon and found msn taking up 50% cpu (or 99% of one core). Other occasions included not firefox itself but a plugin going mad. (Its odd, on linux firefox runs great and opera runs crap, on windows its the other way round (IME)) |
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