DELETING LOGICAL DRIVES USING FDISK 3

[micgla]

I am having a problem deleting the logical drives on the extended partiton. I have win98se, win2000Pro, and win2000 advanced server installed on 1 15 gig HD. 5 gig per OS. I upgraded the mother board(AMD 1ghz processor). I want to clean the entire drive out.I boot w/ win98 startup disk. Go into Fdisk. I try and delete the extended partition, it says cannot delete the extended partition when logical drives exist in the extended. I go and try to delete the logical in the extended DOs partition and it says 'None defined'. It also states that the logical drives have been deleted. However, I still cannot repartition the extended drive (10 gig) due to this situation. I am sucessful in deleteing the Primary and can install win98 to the 5 gig on the primary partition. The extended logical drives consist of Win Pro and Win server on their respective logical drives (I believe they are drive E and F. Can anyone help with this situation? If you need clarification on this let me know. Thank you

 

[Guest_imported]

Mmm, I've had a similar problem in the past... I used Power Quest's DRIVEPRO to do a partial low level format on the drive. Make sure you have the correct drive params in the BIOS.

Good luck!

ROGER - GØAOZ.

 

[edfair]

Zap the drive (write the entire drive with 0's) or use the fill program from debug as described in HW or from DOS use norton utilities to write the boot sector with zeros.
Different operating systems write different things as media descriptors and limited capability fdisks can't always handle what they consider alien. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Alt255]

If you really want to do as you said ("I want to clean the entire drive out&quot, do as Ed Fair suggested. Zap the entire drive with zeroes. This is the only valid way to wipe a disk (short of using the DOD prescribed methods of overwriting each sector with successive patterns).

This is a bit extreme, in most cases. In some cases, it is the only thing that will work. As a tool, FDISK is a poor candidate for cleaning a drive. At best, it modifies a few bytes on a disk, allowing a user to format a drive as he desires. At worst, it does absolutely nothing... it is incapable of understanding anything beyond the few disk bytes that constitute it's realm.

In my opinion, FDISK should have been discarded when EDLIN was abandoned. (Mandatory groan LOL)

Before you try zeroing your drive, before you try wiping the boot sector, you should try FDISK one more time (aaarrrggghhh!). Make sure the primary partition is marked as "Active" (if not, make it so and reboot).

Side note: Good to see you again, Ed. It's good to be back.

 

[Alt255]

Addendum: if you have used a third-party solution to create a multi-boot situation you should refer to the documentation regarding ways to undo the mischief. FDISK probably won't understand the value in the OS Indicator field and the results could be unpredictable. If you or the person who partitioned drive used such a solution, note the details in this thread and we will try to point you to a problem resolution.

Cheers and good luck.

 

[edfair]

So who has abandoned edlin, Craig? Welcome back.
Fdisk isn't always forward compatible. So you might need to use 2K to delete anything it put there. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[euclid]

hi,
this maybe a silly question, did you use ntfs of your win2000 pro and win2000 advanced server partition ?

 

[micgla]

Thanks to all who have helped me figure out the problem with the partition problem.I was able to repartition the drive correctly. The problem was that the 10 gig partition in question was as 'euclid' touched upon, formated in NTFS. So, in order to delete it I installed Win98 on the 5 gig partition then used win2000 to upgrade from Win 98. I used a Win2000 cd to do a clean install and that gives the opportunity to wipe out the previous partitions created using NTFS. Then I went into fdisk and was able to partition all into 1 15 gig partition. Thanks to all for the quick help. I don't have alot of experience using wn2000 but this is the way to learn. Also, what a great Forum (I will come back often).

 

[micgla]

Quick note:

Thanks also to Edfair who also nailed this one. Thanks for the help....

 

[euclid]

micgla,
fdisk also gives you an option of deleting a non-dos partition. this will delete the ntfs partition.

 

[micgla]

One of the option's that fdisk gave did indeed give that option (to delete a non-dos partion) but after I selected that option fdisk replied that there is no non-dos partition to delete. I don't understand why fdisk did not see the non-dos partition but in any case I was successful in deleting the partition using the Win2000 CD. Thanks for the help.

 

[edfair]

It didn't recognize whatever was the file descriptor as a file descriptor.
I've run across this several times trying to downgrade systems. Some 98 can't see 98SE. Some 95 can't see 98, etc. So I'm not surprised at any of them any more. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.