Formatting hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter vrsiler
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vrsiler

I have inadvertenly installed two copies of windows 2000
pro on my hard drive. I wrote earlier asking how to
correct the problem and was told that the best solution
was to format the hard drive and reload the win2000.
I followed the steps outlined by Patrick Brennan on
11/30/03. When I reached the point where asked to delete
the partition, I pressed the D key and waited and found
that nothing was happening.
I then went to the "My Computer" icon and opened it and
selected the "C" drive. I right clicked the icon and
chose "format" I then received the following
message, "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk
utilities or other programs that are using this drive and
make sure no window is displaying the contents of the
drive. Then try formatting again."
Over the last couple of days I have deleted all programs
from the drive and did not have any program open at the
times I tried to do the formatting. I have tried all I can
think of.
I noted some other people having the same kind of problem
on 1/1/03.
Would appreciate any suggestions. I'm ready to install a
new hard drive and send this one to the trash pile.
Thanks for your help.
 
Hello,

If you are trying to delete partitions or format partitions, you can boot
with your Windows 2000 CD and during the installtion routine, you will have
an opportunity to delete any partitions and format partitions.

The Windows 2000 Professional Setup screen appears and welcomes you to
setup,
and then a second screen appears with the following options:

To Setup Windows 2000 on the selected partition, press ENTER.
If you have unpartitioned space on your hard drive, Setup asks if you want
to
create a partition in the unpartitioned space. Press C to select this
option.
To delete the selected partition, press D.

If you elected to install Windows 2000 Professional on a FAT partition,
Setup
asks if you want to leave the current file system intact, format the
partition as
FAT16, convert the existing file system to NTFS, or format the partition
using the
NTFS file system.

Regards,

Ken Simmons

Microsoft Technical Support for Platforms and Business Applications
 
I suspect that Win2K has still stored some of its system
files in the boot sector/address area of the HDD. Try good
old FDISK from Win98 or later. This will remake/realign
the address and boot sectors and what ever was there
before will be gone forever.
 
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