But first get the new fdisk.exe which MS offers.
It can handle the newer big disks.- Hide quoted text -
But can it handle all regarding . NTFS.
I think there may have been an issue with the old one, where if you
had an NTFS partition and a few logical partitions in it, it couldn't
delete the NTFS partition.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310359
"Fdisk cannot recognize NTFS logical drives in an extended partition,
and therefore deletes the NTFS logical drive if it occurs before the
logical drive using the FAT file system."
and there may be a more serious issue , because that kb page describes
trying to delete one partition and deleting another one instead (it
doesn't say if that's due to PEBCAK or an Fdisk bug, or what degree of
mixture).
if you want to delete all partitions then it's certainly safe to try.
Actually. Partition Magic rescue disks (PM for DOS), has an fdisk on
them, that may see NTFS properly, even logical NTFS partitions.
I haven't tested it. But it looked a bit better than normal fdisk. (a
bit more detail, and sensibly, an option to wipe the mbr, no need for
a hidden switch)
note - those disks use Caldera DOS - not that it matters. I guess it
just means a different boot record is on the floppy, and it has 2
files called IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM which may be the equivalent of
io.sys and command.com . maybe. I don't know caldera.. But it works
similar enough to MS-DOS, and I guess the external programs/commands
are interchangeable.
Besides fdisk, there are other ways to delete partitions without going
into windows.
The windows xp setup cd has a thing to remove partitions. And it
wouldn't have an NTFS bug like fdisk. Since you want to install win xp
anyway, you may as well continue with the setup after deleting vista.