I want to delete my C:/ Drive....

Ok... Here's my problem. I am dual booting 2000 and xp. My win 2000 is messed up due to bad sectors on my HD. My xp is installed on another HD (scssi). I tried to change the info in disk management but it wouldnt. I want to erase win 2000 and try to repair the hd and just use it for storage. I was wondering how can I change the C drive which is win 2000. I want to delete it. I have partition magic on zip disk somewhere I thought about trying it. They are a few files I want to save off of C I guess I can back them up on another drive but they are hella huge (lots of dvd rips). How would you suggest I move those also.

THanks ahead of time for your help.

 

so you want to erase the contents of the hard drive? got a boot disk? put it in and it should boot to a:/ when this shows up type format c:

 

Nope dont work....says invalid drive specification

 

can you access it in windows XP?
can you get into windows XP?

if so you have to get to the disk management, which you can get to by right clicking my computer, manage, then disk management,

From there you should be able to right click it then format.

 

ok, I used partition majic tp delete it. Now It restarted and found no bootable OS. So now I cant even boot up my new partition of xp on a different HD. How can I get it to boot the OS on drive F:\?

 

oh sorry my misunderstanding!
try setting up a boot disk with these:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=517
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=518

They should let you access your drive to do whatever, i think, im not sure exactly what it does as ive only ever used the win9x version which i think has a mbr repairer.. i may be mistaken....

 

The predicament you now have, is because even though XP is installed on a second drive or partition, it writes its boot files to the C drive. When you deleted C you removed XPs boot.ini.
Does Partition Magic have an undo feature? If not maybe someone here with more technical knowledge will jump in here to offer advice.
If not I would guess you might have to start from scratch.
Hope someone can help avoid re-install.

 

Ok reinstall xp onto F, this should do the trick < i knwo you have it on F, but reinstall it there>

 

I'm new to this forum, but not new to computers. I've recently retired after 45 years with computers and I'm still learning.

All the responses given so far were correct, as far as they went. But they each addressed only part of the problem.

The terminology "delete my C: drive" is a no no. Deleting a drive implies that the system will no longer see the drive. What you really wanted was to make the drive usable again. The possibility of recovering what you had is now gone since you did the FORMAT on the C: drive. What the format on the C: drive did, besides loosing your data, was to go thru the drive and bring it to a condition where it might be used again. Following a FORMAT, there are no files on that disk and thus you get the "no bootable OS". But at that point, you confuse me since you say that you've lost XP? I thought that you had said that XP was on another hard drive which then might indicate that you formatted that other drive instead of the C: drive??!Q!??

I have seen a few instances over the years where a FORMAT would complete, but the drive was still not usable. But that's very rare.

So let's start at ground zero. Can I assume that you have a bootable floppy which you are able to use and the system will boot up to an A: prompt? You should be able to use it without the CD. If you don't have one, there are several places on the Internet where you can create a Windows98 install boot floppy. One is at www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm#boot_floppy

All the installs that I've done on WindowsXP have been without an install floppy. But I have used a Windows98se install floppy to create the disk system and then installed WindowsXP. I'm not sure right now what Windows2000 does. When a disk structure has not been created by FDISK, it may be possible that the install of XP and 2000 just create one in memory and thus it might not be accessable by FDISK below.

Boot from an install boot floppy. During the bootup process, the system will display some facts about the hard disks that are found. When that information begins to display, press PAUSE which stops the boot progress and will allow you to see what drives are physically there. Copy the disk information onto a piece of paper so that you can send it to me. Indicate in very general terms what you think is on each hard drive. (2000 plus some user files or XP plus ...)

When you've finished that, press the ENTER key to proceed with the boot up. When it gets to the A: prompt, continue below.

I've used Windows 2000 a few times and I've used and installed WindowsNT4.0 for years. I've used and installed XP quite a lot. The best bootable floppy that I've ever used is the one that comes with Windows98se if it contains FDISK and FORMAT. And I'd like you to use FDISK next so that I can know how your hard drives are partitioned.

FDISK can be dangerous. All we want to get from FDISK is the structure that is found of hard drives. None of the instructions that I will give here will make any changes to the hard drive system. Insert the install boot floppy and boot the system. With a floppy in the floppy drive, the system wants to boot to the floppy. When you see the A: prompt, type FDISK and press ENTER. The first screen will ask about LARGE DISK SUPPORT and you should type the letter Y and press ENTER.

The second screen will be a menu. Type the digit 4 (Display partition information) and press ENTER. If you type any other digit, you are entering the door to doom and you must press the ESC key to get back to the FDISK menu.

The next screen will show one line for each hard drive. The first disk drive will be C, the second disk drive will be D. If there is a third disk drive, it will be E. Write down the info from this screen. Below the line for C, there will probably be an additional line, identified as TYPE "ext dos" which we can discuss later if you would like. This screen will ask if you want to display logical drive information. Type the letter Y and press ENTER.

The final screen is the most important one for us. Copy down the information so that you can send it to me.

Press ESC twice to exit out of FDISK.

You can then type DIR C: and press enter to see if there is a folder called WINDOWS. If there is a folder (directory) WINDOWS, there may be an OS on the C: drive You could repeat this for the D: drive and also the E: drive if there is one.

E-mail me the information that you've gathered. I also need to know if you still believe that your data no longer exists on the hard drive which had Windows2000. If it does exist, it will be a simple matter to copy the information to another disk drive without having to bring up Windows. Do you still believe that WindowsXP is no longer on it's hard drive?

When I see the information you send, then I can write part 2 of this based on what really exists.

I've tried to use the terminology "hard drive" or "disk drive" as opposed to "partition". I need to know if you understand the difference. Do you feel comfortable with the prospect of installing WindowsXP and Windows2000?

This has gotten very long and I appologize. I hope that in the next part of this we can get some real work done.

Good Luck
Chris C.

 

hey why dont you just put the info he gets onto this thread, that way we can see how solving the problem progresses, and will be useful to anyone else with the same problem

 

You are correct. I used to be on 32Bit.com before they disappeared and that was a terrible loss to our community.

On my post, my mind was kind of swayed both ways. I knew that in the progress of this, there could be some long replies which would take a lot of space on the server with information that a lot of us already knew. But I also thought that others looking at this thread could post some replies that would be quite helpfull. I think that I want the later.

Thanks
Chris C

 

Would it not be easier to physically remove the C drive and put the F drive as the only hard drive?
If you are formatted with NTFS. You can see it from a floppy boot ONLY if you have something to read NTFS - a DOS boot will not do.
With the XP drive alone in the machine either it will boot or you can repair XP from the XP install CD.

 

WOW great responce Chris... Well I am in a situation like this...
Now I still have a xp pro on a scssi 20 gig hd. It will not boot nor show up in fdisk. BTW its fat32. I ended up trying to change drive letters using partition majic but it screwed everything up. I went to dos 5.0 and used fdisked created another partition on my 120 gig maxtor drive and installed xp again using NTFS. So I now have 2 xp's 1 on each HD. Now it will not boot anything at all I have to use a boot disk to get into xp that I freshly installed. I get an error of a bad boot ini. I am having all kinds of trouble My pc just shuts down anytime during what was a normal strain of multitasking.

Tell you what I want to do in order:

1.I want to start completely fresh with all.
2.I can acess everything right now to back up.
3.I want to install xp on my 20 gig scssi with no partitions.
4.I want to split my 120 gigs up 50 for music, 50 for movies, and 20 for games. I can get by with the rest for regular apps and such on my 20 gig Scssi partition.

Do you suggest this setup for a smooth running pc?

Oh BTW I installed all my OS's before using the method you talked about but using dos 5.0 Fdisk create partition and installed OS.

I just want my pc to run a s smoothly as possible.

Thanks for all the input guys....I am losing sleep over this since I lost 60 gigs of music and movies.

 

I guess that your 20gb scsi is the D: drive, the 120gb is the C: drive??

I've never had to deal with a bad boot.ini, but I'd have to guess that with that file bad there would be trouble booting. It may be bad because when you install XP, boot.ini ends up in a bad spot on the disk??!!

I suspect that you structured the 20gb as NTFS in the hopes that changing to NTFS would make things better. I don't believe that NTFS had any possibility of fixing anything. With that drive structured as NTFS, FDISK isn't going to be able to help us know exactly how things stand.

Let's get things back to the point where we can tell at the lowest possible level that we have good hardware and a good file system on both.

And I think that you have a bunch more expertise than you might credit yourself with. Now I can write things in fewer words and feel good that you'll be able to follow.

First, let's get the 20gb back to FAT32. DOS5.0 was a long way back for me. And I used it for many years because it was so much better than those miserable days with DOS3 and 4. I don't think that 5.0 had LBA, so formatting and/or FDISKing with 5.0 would not give a good file structure on either of your drives. So, get FORMAT and FDISK from Windows98se or WindowsME. If you can't get one quickly, send me a private message with your e-mail address and I'll send them to you.

With the 20gb back to FAT32, use the Windows98se install floppy to bootup and use option 4 of FDISK and give me the information for both drives shown by FDISK. Include all partitions in what you extract with FDISk in what you send me.

I'm still not sure that you've lost all the data from the 120gb hard drive. Or perhaps I'm just hoping that this enormous amount of data has not been lost. If FDISK will recognize the 120gb disk, then do a DIR to see what DOS finds on the 120gb disk.

I've never had a SCSI disk. Will system setup allow no EIDE disks and 1 SCSI? I suspect that it must allow that setup. If that is true, my next step would be to remove the 120gb drive from the system (unplug the data/ribbon cable AND the power plug), do an FDISK and FORMAT on the 20gb so that it is FAT32 with a single partition and it active. Observe the FORMAT and the display it gives when the FORMAT is complete. Does it show any bad sectors? If there are bad sectors, I don't know of any way that the install of XP would use to mark the bad sectors and if boot.ini resided in the bad sector, then boot could have a very real problem. Since we are FORMATting before the install, the install will skip right around the bad sectors and you will have a bootable XP on the 20gb.

And then install WindowsXP on that physical drive which will be identified as the C: drive since you will have removed the 120GB from your system. With this done, we will have reduced the file system to a very simple system with no other distractions. Now you "should" be able to boot to WindowsXP. If it doesn't boot, I'd have to suspect that your install CD has a problem. If it does fail, you should probably FORMAT the 20gb drive and install XP again. And if it still fails, you could perhaps borrow someone else's XP and install that and if XP then does boot, you really have a bad install CD.

When we have a good bootup of XP from the 20gb as a SCSI C:drive, then we can put the 120gb back in as the C: drive and the 20gb will become the D: drive. Then change the BIOS to boot from D: and we'll decide then what to do about the 120gb.

So, let me know what FDISK tells you about all partitions. Remove the 120gb disk from the system. Make the 20gb into FAT32 with only one partition. FORMAT the 20gb. Install XP on the 20gb. And let me know how everything works up to this point.

Good Luck
Chris C

 

I think you stated you could back up.
I think this is the way to go for no more problems:
1) backup what you want to keep
2) download the drivers for the SCSI to floppy
3) shut down and remove the cables from all but the SCSI and CDROM
4) do a full install of XP and format for NTFS
5) Finish all the upgrades and drivers for XP
6) shutdown and plug the other stuff in, be sure the SCSI is set as boot in the BIOS.
7) if step 6 boots the wrong volume, boot a floopy, fdisk and format your IDE drive
8) You will have a clean install of XP with NTFS (you really want this) and your SCSI as C:

 

I think thats the way I would like to go. Anyone else heard of using the Win 98 boot disk method for installing xp? Sorry Chris, Just would like a second opinion, Also I am not familiar with networking using xp. My son and I run a network of computers at home and it was very easy to do with all win 2000. I jusy want to be safe using xp. Because I'm not familiar with the security risks of having ports open, and the set up of file transfers and remote computer in a xp enviroment. Are they a way to make sure that all files are gone off a partition? Because I always run into problems with hidden files still hanging around.

Again thanks for all the feedback!

 

No need for appologies. My stand, and I urge you to take it also, is that I must understand completely any advice, no matter how many times I have to verify it. And I know that there are some who will get aggravated when I ask again because the advise and I don't thoroughly understand each other.

If you are at all nervous about using XP, why not go back to all Windows2000? What little experience I have with XP and networks, networks seems to be something that MS finally got right in XP. And I think that networks is probably equally good in Windows2000.

As for formatting using the Windows98se FDISK and FORMAT, I've done that on several systems and it serves to validate the physical disk. It doesn't bother the XP install at all. I haven't tried it yet with Windows2000, but I would have to assume (yes, I know what ASS_U_ME means when the word is broken into it's parts!) that it would be just as usefull prior to a Windows2000 install.

I'm no great fan of NTFS. It is usefull when the need for data security is imperative. But for the home user who takes normal precautions, NTFS just is not attractive. From what I've read, NTFS is slightly slower than FAT32 and when problems occur, it's designed for almost impossible recovery.

As for transferring data between FAT32 and NTFS or from NTFS to FAT32, I've done some minimal testing where I've copied between the 2 formats and it appears to work. I haven't tested this enough yet, but at this point I don't understand what the problem is.

I worked for a very large corporation up to the time when I retired a couple of years ago. They had made an extensive study of NTFS vs FAT16 (because FAT32 had not occured yet). The descision was that we would upgrade from Windows3.1 to WindowsNT4.0 and we were not allowed to ever use NTFS. That employer has since gone to Windows2000Pro with NTFS still baned when they considered Windows2000 vs. WindowsXP.

I've heard mentioned the problem of no DEFRAG on an NTFS partition. NTFS is more prone to fragmentation which then becomes a problem of programs slowing down as fragmentation takes hold. For a home user, this is probably not a big consideration.

If I can be of any further help, don't hesitate to contact me here or via my e-mail address which you have.

Regards
Chris C.

 

I think this has something to do with fdisk on my 120 gig HD:

When you use Fdisk.exe to partition a hard disk that is larger than 64 GB (64 gigabytes, or 68,719,476,736 bytes) in size, Fdisk does not report the correct size of the hard disk.

The size that Fdisk reports is the full size of the hard disk minus 64 GB. For example, if the physical drive is 70.3 GB (75,484,122,112 bytes) in size, Fdisk reports the drive as being 6.3 GB (6,764,579,840 bytes) in size.

as seen on here:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q263044

I now have a problem of my keyboard not working while using the win. 98 bootdisk, it works during start up but when booted from floppy it does not work. The lights are on and I tried 2 keyboards.

 

I did place all my important files aka music and movies...lol to another partition on another drive. That way if I do get hosed I will have that data. Where do I get a boot disk with ghost on it?

 

ok, here's where I stand now.
I unplugged the 120gb HD and used a WIN ME bootdisk and fdisked all partitions. I formated with NTFS and installed Win XPPro to the 20 gig scsi HD. Everything booted up great had no problems. I went to plug my 120 gig back up and fdisked the 2 partitions and left my back up partition. Now It will not let me boot back into c: or even boot with a disc. I get the error:

file is missing or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
please re-install a copy of the above file

But... If I unplug my 120HD My 20 will boot up just fine.
Maybe I will call Maxtor for some support.

Does anyone know how to install files thru DOS?

 

I give up

Ok, Ok update!! I give up!

I called maxtor and that was no help at all, so I decided just to create a ntfs partition using a win me startup disk on my 120gb HD. I fdisked my freshly installed and tweaked out xp pro on my scsi drive. Wasted about 4 hours last night! But now finally I have a bootable operating system!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I now have on my 120 gig Maxtor HD:
1 partition of 40 gigs - Xp Pro
1 partition of 40 gigs - Gonna be for music
1 partition of 30 gigs - used for backup

On my 20 gig scsi HD:
nothing... gonna use it for movies.

Will it make a difference where I install my pc games? I have always installed them into another partition I always felt like if its in the same partition as the OS it might slow it down. Also what format do I need for my backup, music, and movies partitions? NTFS, or FAT32? My OS is on a NTFS partiton.

Well I'm gonna end this thread on a Happy note I finally got this thing set up right!!

Giving props to these sites for helping:
http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm
http://www.speedguide.net/
and of course:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/

Thanks for all your support!

My next task will be setting up a XP pro network.

 

Just a thought

Just a rather late thought, you didn't actually try to repair the xp partitions using the win xp disc did you? I would have thought that it could fix the boot problem. Also I believe maxtors hide a copy of the origional MBR which can be restored using the supplied install disk (or maybe that was WD).

Oh on a seperate note, If you put your backup on the same physical drive it too would be destroyed if the hard drive actually fails.. Why not use the 20 gig SCSI for backup (although the faster SCSI drive would probably be much better for games and whatnot that spend a great deal of time accessing the disk.)

Njal