Hard drive partition not recognized after reboot

[bobmcgee]

Here's the problem. I am running a dell inspiron 5000e notebook with the following configuration. I have a 20GB hitachi HD that I cannot seem to partition. I have used a boot disk that boots me into a DOS working enviroment, and I used fdisk to make a single partition. It then prompts me to restart the computer and format the drives.

After I rebooted and tried to format C:, I got the following error,

"invalid drive specification"

I re-ran fdisk and looked at the partition information (#4) and it said that there were no partitions defined. What is going on? Thanks for your help!

-bob

 

[brygee]

is the drive set as active in fdisk?

 

[bobmcgee]

Sorry, the drive was made active in fdisk. I forgot to say that.

-bob

 

[ALDAL]

Bob,

I don't know what O/S you have but I hope this will help.

Click Start/ Control panel/ Administrative tools/ Computer Management/ Storage/ Disk Management.
Select the disk you want to add a partition to. you should have unused disk space. create an extended drive by clicking on the unused disk space, then create a logical drive within the extended drive. you will be able to sellect the size of, or number of drives you wish to create.

hope this is of help to you.
as I said, I do not know your operating system!

AL.

 

[Bobg1]

"Click Start/ Control panel/ Administrative tools/ Computer Management/ Storage/ Disk Management"

Now how is he supposed to do that, he's trying to partition a blank drive.

Bob
Is bios recognize the drive properly?
Make sure you are trying to set a primary partition.
After running fdisk and before rebooting go back into fdisk and check and see what it says. If the info shows you should be able to reboot and format. If not there may be a problem with fdisk, try to get a different copy to use.