Hard Drive Formatting problem

[Roy Keane]

I'm trying to wipe out the contents of my father-in-law's Thinkpad
reinstall Windows XP (home) and start over.

When I place the XP disk in the CD drive and boot, I get a messag
after a few moments: "you must remove the HP personal media drive...
It thinks there is a removable drive attached, and it's warning me tha
if I don't remove the drive, the contents of that drive will be erased


Problem is, there are no devices attached. Nothing. I tried going int
BIOS and cutting everything off during startup except for the C
drive...no dice. How do I get beyond this thing

 

[Guest]

Have you tried just letting it run. If you are sure that nothing is attached.

 

[Guest]

Some manufacturers (HP included) will put a small partition on the hard drive
for system recovery. I would guess that this partition is what your
installation is complaining about. If you are NOT recovering the original HP
installation, then go ahead and remove the partition and format the entire
drive.

GP

 

[Roy Keane]

GP - how do I know which partition it is? I was able to get to the FDIS
menu using a Win98 boot disk, but I'm not sure how to use FDISK to solv
this problem

 

[Jim]

I'm trying to wipe out the contents of my father-in-law's Thinkpad,
reinstall Windows XP (home) and start over.

When I place the XP disk in the CD drive and boot, I get a message
after a few moments: "you must remove the HP personal media drive..."
It thinks there is a removable drive attached, and it's warning me that
if I don't remove the drive, the contents of that drive will be erased.


Problem is, there are no devices attached. Nothing. I tried going into
BIOS and cutting everything off during startup except for the CD
drive...no dice. How do I get beyond this thing?

As GP said, this likely to be a recovery partition that HP provided instead
of enclosing an XP CD. What you should do is to refer to the manual to
determine how to restore XP from that partition.

In case you wish to proceed with the XP CD, why are you concerned about a
partition that will never use?

Bootini should give some hint as to which partition XP resides on. Besides,
it is the big one anyway.

Jim

 

[Roy Keane]

I'm not concerned about it the partition, Jim...but I can't get past
that warning message in order to do anything (see my reply about that
above).

 

[Ron Martell]

I'm trying to wipe out the contents of my father-in-law's Thinkpad,
reinstall Windows XP (home) and start over.

When I place the XP disk in the CD drive and boot, I get a message
after a few moments: "you must remove the HP personal media drive..."
It thinks there is a removable drive attached, and it's warning me that
if I don't remove the drive, the contents of that drive will be erased.


Problem is, there are no devices attached. Nothing. I tried going into
BIOS and cutting everything off during startup except for the CD
drive...no dice. How do I get beyond this thing?

With many Thinkpads you access the built-in Recovery Partition by
pressing F12 during the initial stages of the Power On Self Test -
right after pressing the switch, before the Windows XP logo appears.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
Syberfix Remote Computer Repair

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