What is a simple volume?

[Staubsaugen]

When I try to partition and format one of my harddrives it only lets me make it a simple volume. Why does it do this and how do I make it let me partition it as an extended partition? It's a 120 gig WD IDE drive.

[Tow3lie]

I cant help, but one of my friends had the same problem with the same hard-drive. i got 1 but i didnt have that problem. Sorry

[Staubsaugen]

i think it has to do with the fact that this harddrive used to be in a computer before that had a RAID card in it. There has to be a way to do a low level format on it that'll wipe out any previous information so i can just start with a blank disk.

[turd]

I would guess that you are trying to partition and format from within a system that has 2k or XP on it and that this is an added drive?


Whats going on is that that disk is formated has been formated as or because of that "RAID card setup" is now recognized as dynamic as opossed to being a basic disk. I would also guess that you are not using a Dynamic setup in the system that you want to add this to, if that is the case.

Here is a link for fixing that if you are in fact adding it to an XP/2K system.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/dm_simple_volume.mspx

If you are attempting to do a fresh install with that disk and your install CD cannot wipe it for you, then the easist way would be to go the manufacturer web site and get their disk utilities and use those to format out that drive. There is also the commands from the recovery console: fixmbr, fixboot,format and diskpart. Also from DOS there is format /mbr

[Staubsaugen]

yes, that's correct. It used to be in a computer that had a RAID card, but my new one doesn't. The link you have only takes me to an XP thing, it talks about a program called diskpart.exe, but that doesn't work on 2000.

[shadowdr]

WD's lifeguard tools put on a floppy will work for you.You should be able to do it the quick way where it writes 0's to the first part of the drive where the boot info would be.Go here (http://support.wdc.com/download/) to read about and download them.

[kct2]

A simple volume is the basic volume type that is made on a dynamic disk. If you want to make a 'normal' partition you need to use the disk management console to convert the disk back to a basic disk. But, I don't see any reason to do that. Just make a simple volume.

[Staubsaugen]

i used my win2k CD to delete the partition and it worked.