Small Partition After XP Install Removal

[baltman]

I installed XP on a SCSI drive and the 8 meg partition the install uses is now visible (it is not the primary boot drive). I can't seem to get rid of it.

Partition Magic says the drive has different geometry and won't do anything with it.

I just want to hide the 8 meg partition.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Brian

 

[firewolfrl]

Run:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskmgmt.msc
and remove the drive letter to make the partition invisible

 

[zyphac]

HiBrian,
I have a SCSI seagate, it has a 7 meg unused space, and a WD IDE drive with about 8 megs too. Partion magic won't allow me to do any thing with that either. This leads me to belive that this is left over space form the manufacturing process. I'm not a computer engineer, I guess what ever they use(chip) to determain what the size drive and geometry, if there is any space left over it can't be used, hidden, or merged. I have 2 WD 40GB 7200 RPM drives, I used them for RAID, The only problem was one drive read 40.01 and the other 39.99, and the 39.99 had about 7 megs of unused space that could not be used, both e same model, make. I guess the bottem line is there is nothing you can do with it, its just there. I'd start worrying if that number jumped to say 100 megs. Maybe it just this new trend of sloppy craftsmanship. Cheers
zypha

 

[trentosis]

try fdisk

 

[baltman]

Zypha,

I'm pretty sure the space is reserved by an MS OS install.

I found that I could re-format the drive using the utility in the SCSI card bios. From there Partition Magic was able to put the file system on it and now 100% of the drive is available for my use.

This solution would not have been a very happy one if I had invested more time in installing an OS and programs on the drive.

FYI Partition Magic can also recover the 8 Meg partition and merge it with the rest of your dive if you care to get 8 megs back... I just tried it on an IDE drive... I had to resize the clusters of the 8 meg partition first, but it only took a minute.

Trentosis, I did think to try fdisk, but XP no longer seems to provide it. I also doubted it'd help since Patition Magic seems to use a similar program and was getting an error that it could not procede and then restarting.

Thanks all,

Brian

 

[zyphac]

Brian,

So you used the low level format utility in the SCSI card BIOS. Then used partion magic to merge the 8 meg partition.
I have tried to do this with fdisk, ,dos ver of partion magic. and it still is showing the 8 meg unused space, mine isnot actually a partion,8 megs of unused space. When I got the drive I used fdisk to set up the partions, and it sshowed 8 megs of unallocated space. I have since put win xp on it. Never could use the 8 megs.

Zypha

 

[baltman]

No, the scsi card bios formatting made the entire drive usable but the drive wan't visible and 'quick formatting' via Partition Magic mounted it for me... I'm sure there are other ways to get there, but that's what I did.

I recovered the 8 megs from an ide drive that was formatted by an XP full install off of a CD boot.

The reason I have so many drives that just got XP installs is that my raid 0 boot drives had a corrupted registry hive (.../system is corrupt) error and wouldn't boot so I tried using the scsi as a boot so that I could repair the raid, but the scsi bios wouldn't allow the raid (MB bios) to load, so I added an ide drive to become the primary boot drive.

The good news is that the second I booted off of the new ide drive with the raid support enabled XP instantly noted a problem with the raid and fixed it.

The lesson to learn is that my problem (registry hive corruption) sounds somewhat common in 2000 and XP and that a raid should thus never be used as a boot drive since all other solutions assume that a boot disk or the OS install CD can see and thus repair the (problem) drive from a CD boot, which isn't the case with (my) raid.

Brian