Hard Drive Partitions (WME)

[nectarios]

I am having problems removing partitions from my hard drive. I have a computer that had WinME with a partitioned hard drive. I upgraded to XP Pro over top of ME about 5 months ago. I've been having problems with performace and software lately and decided to back up all my data, format my hard drive and install XP again. I used fdisk and deleted the partition but after I formatted the drive and installed ME (I couldn't install XP from scratch because my computer wouldn't boot to the XP CD) I saw that my C drive was the same size as one of the partitions I had previously and I don't have access to the remainder of the drives capacity. I was going to upgrade to XP again but I want to resolve the partition issue with my hard drive first.

Any thoughts on what I did wrong or ommited to do?

Thanks,

Nectarios

[adg]

You do not want to upgrade from a DOS based OS (ME) to an ntfs based OS (XP) if you can help it. In the long run you will have trouble.

Why can't you boot to the XP CD?

Allan
<a target="_blank" href=http://www.tweakdatabase.com/idealbb>tweakxp.com</a>

[nectarios]

Idealy, that's what I wanted to do - install XP right off the bat. I think my XP CD might be damaged and that's why my computer will not boot to it. Maybe I have to do something during the boot process differently with XP? In the meantime how do I get all of my drives capacity back?

Nectarios

[adg]

What happens when you try to boot to the XP CD?

Allan
<a target="_blank" href=http://www.tweakdatabase.com/idealbb>tweakxp.com</a>

[jdharm]

I have had success in solving issues similar to this by doing a low level format. This overwrites the entire drive, partition tables and all, with zeros and puts it back in its 'new from the factory' state.

Ideally you should use the low level formatting tool offered by the manufacturer of the hard drive in question. However, for a simple zero overwrite I have used Maxtor's MaxBlast on a wide range of hdd's from different manufacturers with no ill effect. This app seems a little simpler to use than some of the others I have seen.

Josh
<a target="_blank" href=http://www.jdharm.net>www.jdharm.net</a>

[cmon]

Xp can be booted from a win98 flop. Either copy the whole i386 folder to a second partition on the hard drive . Or from the cd drive. After boot from flop just go into the i386 folder and type winnt.exe.

Enable smartdrive (smartdrv.exe sorry forgot where it is either the virtual drive or a win98 cd at the tools/oldmsdos folder) to speed things up.

Keyboard error or no keyboard present


press F1 to continue ; Del to enter setup

[The_Dude]

If your original drive was partitioned you will have to remove all the partitions. Go from last to first, delete the logical dos drive E:, then delete the extended dos partition that E: was in. Now delete the primary dos partition. There should be no partitions now,I assumed there were only two partitions, if there was more than two you will have more logical dos drives to delete. It sounds like you deleted the primary partition only and left the rest hanging in never never land.

You can download a utility from microsoft to make the disk set for XP, make sure you get the correct one home and pro are different.

Also as mentioned you could use a win 98 boot disk. Setup won't run from dos but you can run "winnt.exe" from the i386 folder and install OK. Load smartdrv if you can, the install will be a lot faster that way. If you XP cd is an upgrade you can still do a clean install, just put you other OS cd in when asked. XP will take a quick look at it and then carry on with the install.