How do I remove a WINXP partition ?

[PositiveD]

I have a brand new drive on which I was doing some testing. I created 2 DOS partitions then tried to Install XP in the secondary Partition.
I now need to remove the partial installation of XP and the secondary partition. and restore the full HDD to DOS partitions.
FDISK recognizes the 2 partition but does not show any drive in the socondary partition.
When I try to delete that partition it won't let me. It says partition cannot be deleted because there is a non DOS logical drive.
What do I do ?

 

[knporter]

If you formated the second partion using a file format that dos can not recognize (NTFS,FAT32) this would explain why dos cannot delete the partition. Boot your machine with the WinXP CD in the drive and start the WinXP install. You should be able to get to the hard drive partion screen before any thing else. You should be able to remove the second partition. This would also delete any files created by the aborted install. "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

--Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

 

[Enkrypted]

An easier thing to do would be to boot off a Win98 boot disk. Go into the FDISK command and then select option number 5 <Change current fixed disk drive>. Select the second drive<The one with the non-dos file system>. That will take you back to your main choices in fdisk. Select to delete partition and then select delete non-dos partition. Once that partition has been deleted you should be able to work your way back down to a completely unpartitioned drive.

 

[PositiveD]

I used a NTFS file format.
Before I do what you suggested I need to get it to boot from CD. Right now it's booting up from XP. The only 3 options are to look for another OS, run XP, retry installing XP.
If I can ge tot the command line can I do it from there ?

 

[wolluf]

Try this

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/pdisk.exe

(run from win98 boot disk or similar) - it should allow you to remove that second partition.