Unable to repartion

[typhoonmike]

Okay trying to set up my dad's computer he brought home from work. Had Windows ME on it and was just going to drop it back down to 98SE. Went to repartion using FDISK and it had the boot partion of drive C with an extended partion using logical drive D. Well I deleted the logical drive D but when I try to get rid of the extented partition it says I can't because there are still logical drives there. I can't seem to figure it out. There is about 6gigs of wasted space on the hard drive I figure because I can't get rid of some hidden partion or something. Any clue? Oh and I don't have partition magic or any of that stuff so basically I'll have to fix it using just fdisk.

[Godfodda]

Just to make sure I understand, you're going to wipe everything and reinstall, right? If that's the case, you can use format /mbr (I think that's it) to destroy the partition information. Before you do it, though, let someone else come in and verify. I just fdisked another system last night but I've slept since then. :)

[typhoonmike]

Oh yeah I'm wiping everything completely clean. But for some reason even though I had deleted the logical drive I couldn't delete the extended partion because it said there were still logical drives present. The extended partion was taking up about 6500mb of space it said but I could not find the logical drive it was speaking of.

[typhoonmike]

Well the actual command is fdisk /mbr and that rewrites the master boot record on the harddrive. Didn't work though. Still have 36% of the drive sitting in some hidden partion or something.

[Sonny]

Originally posted by typhoonmike
Well the actual command is fdisk /mbr and that rewrites the master boot record on the harddrive. Didn't work though. Still have 36% of the drive sitting in some hidden partion or something. You can try going here (http://www.fdisk.com/) for more info about partitioning problems.

[jbell]

Go into the install of 98SE and when it asks you format D drive from there - then cancel out of the install go back into fdisk and take a look around... I had a similar problem on my current rig with that... only I used nt4 to format to NTFS then I fdisk'd then I formatted back to fat32 with WinME

[typhoonmike]

Well it doesn't show up under Windows or while formatting. But when I run FDISK it shows up and says it's occupying 33% of the drive. Computer came from the main office where it belonged to the "Computer Guru" down there. I don't think he knew that much. Apparently he just knew more then others.

[Jon]

This might take a while but will work.

Go to BootDisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com) and download the WIn2K startup disks (NT4 disks will work too...there are only 3 of those). There are 4 of them. Copy the images to the disks using WinImage, it's shareware and I believe there is a link on the site to download it.

Start your computer using the startup disks. You will come to the part where you set up the partitioning of the drives. Delete all partitions that appear until you have only one unformatted and unpartitoned space. Hit enter to verify your settings and it will begin to format the drives. Hit reset on your PC and restart. Remove any disks in the PC and put your Win98 startup disk in.

You will now have a totally unpartitioned/unformatted drive to work FDISK with.

Good luck.

[typhoonmike]

Well went to Bootdisk.com. Didn't try the WIN2K files though. Tried something else that claimed to delete linux,NT, and other partitions. Worked perfectly. Thanks for letting me know about the site though.

[WyrmMaster]

Its possible that the partition had linux on it, that would really screw things up. Glad you fixed it though.

[Maximus Nickus]

Make sure your board detects it as the size it is as otherwise it will be pointless, if it can't then use fat 16 and make all the drives 2gig as older boards (like 486 ones) can't read ay partition bigger than 2gig, if you do though you will have to re-partition on a machine that CAN RECOGNISE the drive.
I would try it on a other machine then put it back, if you can...