Netvista HD Hidden Partition Removal

[Newbytoo]

This is my first post here. Suggestions appreciated......!

I am making a dual boot Win XP Home and Unix box from an IBM Netvista 8306-KCU. I added a healthy spare 30gig (Hitachi DTLA 305030) drive from an expired Netvista. Win XP recognized the new-old drive as D: but reported only 1.98 gig. That looked suspiciously to be the IBM service partition.

I have tried various tools to remove the partition on d:, including XP disk management. Won't go.

Tried to disable security on the partition by booting into the IBM set-up utility in case the BIOS was "locking" the partition. There wasn't any way to change the security on the drive in the utility.

Tried various Hitachi HD utiliies. No luck.

Tried IBM Wipe and Zap utilities. Still there.

Tried Ranish Partition Manager. Showed drive as 30 gig, but wouldn't permanently remove the partition.

Getting desperate.

Tried Win DISKPART at the XP command prompt. Showed the disk as 2014 meg. (1 partition/type primary/size 2014mb). I selected the partition, deleted it with the override option, issued the clean all command. Still showed disk as 2014mb.

Any ideas on how to make the whole 30 gig available?

Thanks much.

 

[edfair]

You might try fdisk from a 98SE boot disk. Possibly a 6.22 fdisk.

Or possibly the program killdisk. Should be able to find it through google.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[G0AOZ]

In this situation I'd use something like Power Quest's Drive Pro software which can be used to wipe out the first few cylinders. This is usually enough to knock off all partitions on the disk. Then use a WIN98 or DOS disk to run FDISK /MBR on it to ensure a clean Master Boot Record

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[Newbytoo]

Thanks for your posts edfair and G0AOZ - by pure luck I finally identified the problem. I successfully made use of a WIN ME bootdisk, Fdisked as suggested to partition the HD and then formatted it. XP still would recognize the drive as 1.98gig (out of 30gig). As a last resort, I was about to change the drive recogintion from cable select to master/slave (just guessing - like I said - desperate), which meant moving the jumpers on the back of the drive. I noticed that the jumpers had been set to enable something called "2 gig clip" - bingo. As soon as I changed the jumpers to the correct position, the drive behaved as expected. There is something curious here, since all the utilities that I tried (and I tried many, many) allowed the drive to be partioned, formatted etc to 30 gig, with the jumpers set at a 2 gig limit! And so we learn......