Need help formatting a partitioned HD...

[ron]

I posted earlier and got some help(on another forum) and this is where I'm at so far.....It's my bro's PC and he's got a partitioned
HD with windows 2000 and win 98 on it. It will only boot to windows 2000. It will boot to win 98 in safe mode only. I tried as
others have said using the DELPART.EXE but get this, his floppy drive is not registering/accessable!!!!!!! I cannot figure out how
to get his floppy drive to work. It doesn't register in either partition. Where others erase stuff on accident, I cannot get his HD
to format/erase anything.....any ideas??

ron

 

[ron]

I should have added that I want to make the newly formatted HD all ONE drive. I do not wish to make it into multiple
partitions.....

ron

 

[JAD]

I posted earlier and got some help(on another forum) and this is where I'm

at so far.....It's my bro's PC and he's got a partitioned

HD with windows 2000 and win 98 on it. It will only boot to windows 2000.

It will boot to win 98 in safe mode only. I tried as

others have said using the DELPART.EXE but get this, his floppy drive is

not registering/accessable!!!!!!!

I cannot figure out how to get his floppy drive to work. It doesn't

register in either partition.

Huh?


Where others erase stuff on accident, I cannot get his HD

 

[ron]

Don't know exactly how to say it. His floppy does not work, period.....

I did boot win98 in safe mode and it shows a 5 and 1/4 floppy icon. Ya got
me....

ron

 

[JAD]

Don't know exactly how to say it. His floppy does not work, period.....

I did boot win98 in safe mode and it shows a 5 and 1/4 floppy icon. Ya got
me....

ron

IC ok in the bios/Cmos setup you will have to set the type of floppy that
exist on the system. DEL at start up usually gets you there. Provided the
cabling and the drive are in good condition. This maybe the reason 98 is not
booting normally. Hardware is not being detected properly. Possibly the cmos
battery is going bad. Have you seen a 'Checksum Error F1 to Continue' line
on the bootup/post sequence?

 

[John]

I posted earlier and got some help(on another forum) and this is where
I'm at so far.....It's my bro's PC and he's got a partitioned HD with
windows 2000 and win 98 on it. It will only boot to windows 2000. It
will boot to win 98 in safe mode only. I tried as others have said
using the DELPART.EXE but get this, his floppy drive is not
registering/accessable!!!!!!! I cannot figure out how to get his
floppy drive to work. It doesn't register in either partition. Where
others erase stuff on accident, I cannot get his HD to format/erase
anything.....any ideas??

ron

Ron,

I'm no expert but I think I can point you in the right direction. Try this:

Find a MS DOS boot disk that you can boot up to a DOS A: prompt from. If
you don't have one or can't make one, try going to www.bootdisk.com and
download a bootdisk program that will make a DOS bootable floppy. You may
want to make it and verify it is bootable on another computer with a known
working floppy drive.

Once you know you have a bootable DOS floppy, copy Delpart onto the
bootable floppy.

Check the BIOS settings on your brother's computer to insure the floppy
disk is controller enabled and set as the first boot device.

Power up (or press the reset button on the computer) with the bootable
floppy in the floppy drive and when you get to the A: DOS prompt, run the
Delpart utility. With any luck the hard drive should be clean now.

If the floppy drive does not work (broken), you could try making a bootable
CD and placing Delpart on it and just boot to the CD and run Delpart. Just
make sure the BIOS is optioned to boot to CD before the hard drive.

In fact, you may just be able to put Delpart on a CD and when you boot to
the W98 safe mode you might just be able to run it from the CD ... although
I have not done this so not sure if that will work .. worth a try though
CD's are cheap.

Good luck,

John

 

[ron]

John,

thanks for your help. I did in fact get the floppy to work and ran
the delpart utility. I now cannot get fdisk to run....????

ron

 

[Jan Alter]

I now cannot get fdisk to run....????

Ultimately, you said you wanted to make one partition. What OS do you
want to install?
If you want to put XP on you should forgot deleting partitions with fdisk
and the floppy drive and concentrate on starting the machine with the CD-ROM
as the first boot device from the bios. Once you can start the computer with
XP you can delete the remaining XP partition (NTFS or FAT32) and create a
new partition with the newly freed space that you got when you used the
delpart.exe program to lose the Win98 partition, and then combine it with
the previous XP partition that was probably in NTFS format.

I'm not sure why you can't get fdisk to run? How large is the drive you're
trying to partition? Are you booting with a Win98 startup disk?

 

[JAD]

is fdisk.exe on the disk your using to boot?

John,

thanks for your help. I did in fact get the floppy to work and ran
the delpart utility. I now cannot get fdisk to run....????

ron