Formatting second hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony Sanders
  • Start date Start date
T

Tony Sanders

I have converted my 2 m/c WinXP Pro/Win98 Server/Slave network to an
all WinXP Pro network.

In so doing I bought a new 40gig HD for the slave, installed WinXP Pro
(relatively trouble free), sucked all the end user document and data
files from the old Win98 disk onto the new drive, and then moved the
old 18gig Win98 HD to the server to be its second drive.

I have deleted all files from (what is now) drive_1 in the server and
want to reformat it (NTFS). Numerous attempts at reformatting using
the format command from the Windows Explorer File Menu, however, have
failed (error message advising me to close any programs accessing the
disk etc. and to try again).

Closing everything down and booting from the XP CD is a bit of a
nuisance - but, is that what I will have to do?



-----------------------------------------------
Tony Sanders
New Zealand/Aotearoa

tony.sanders@[nospam]xtra.co.nz
-------------------------------------------
 
I had very similar issue with the second drive on the
primary IDE controller. I finaly had to pull the master,
then cabled the slave as master, booted from XP cd, went
to recovery "F10 key" at setup screen. Used diskpart then
format to create partition and format. Then re-cabled in
the master. Now the system sees it correctly. I tried
jumper configuration, new cables and several other
options before simply pulling the master and then putting
it back in when I was done. Still can't get a good backup
to the secondary drive though...working on it.
FYI...Intel D850MV board with most current bios and
native XP controller drivers. WD 20 gb drive on
secondary, 60gb as master.
 
That can be the easiest way but can also be the most problematic. The latter
may be the case if the drive can not be dismounted without impacting the
system.

start->run->diskmgmt.msc [enter]

This will bring up the disk management console. In the bottom 'half' of the
screen, right click the drive and select "change driver letter...". Take the
remove option. If the drive is not actively in use then this will work
without issue in which case right click the drive, delete partition, right
click, create, etc. If the drive can not be dismounted then you're going to
have to determine why and address that issue. I'm a bit vague at the moment
since I'm not certain how you got where you are without falling afoul of
some other major issues.

--
Walter Clayton - MS MVP(WinXP)
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://www.dts-l.org
 
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