Or at least, people who are more familiar with the intricacies of Windows 2000 than I am.
Here’s the short version: Why can’t I delete a partition from within the Windows 2000 setup utility?
Here’s the long version:
I’m in the midst of nuking and paving (wiping and reinstalling) my Windows box, running Windows 2000. The machine has two physical hard drives in it — a 2GB drive and a 6GB drive. Under my previous setup, I had the 2GB drive mapped to C:, and the 6GB drive partitioned into 4GB for D: (for documents and downloads), 1.5GB for E: (for applications), and 500MB for F: (for a scratch/temp disk). The thinking at the time (since I’m far more used to the Mac) was that I’d be able to reinstall Windows on the C: partition if it had issues, and I wouldn’t risk either losing my documents or having to reinstall my applications, as they were on seperate partitions. Of course, on Windows, it’s not that easy, as so many applications tie into the registry, so over time, I decided to ditch that scheme.
So now I’m working on the reinstall. While in the Windows 2000 setup utility, I’m given the option of deleting and recreating partitions on my drives. My plan was to essentially flip-flop things around — use the 6GB drive as my Windows 2000 system and application partition, and the 2GB drive for documents and downloads. So, I happily nuked all the partitions on the 6GB drive and created one single large partition across the entire drive. However, for some reason, the 2GB drive seems to be locked down — I can’t delete that partition at all.
Okay, so I figured maybe that was because I’d started the reinstall process by booting off that drive, and since the installer copied a few files onto the drive for the install before restarting and dumping me into the DOS-based setup utility, it couldn’t wipe that drive as it would end up wiping those files. So, once Windows was installed and I rebooted from the new installation, I tried reformatting the 2GB drive from within Windows, and it still won’t do it. The 2GB drive (still C:, but not booting from it) has the designation ‘System’ visible in the Drive Manager (or whatever that window is called — I’m going from memory on that right now), and the 6GB drive (D:, booting Windows 2000) is designated ‘Startup’. Obviously, the Startup drive shouldn’t be nukeable, but I’m not too sure why the 2GB drive has the ‘System’ label, or why it’s still locked down.
In one final guess, I went back into the Windows 2000 setup utility, this time starting the process after booting from the new install on the 6GB (D:) drive. I wasn’t sure this would work, but I figured it was worth a shot, guessing that the lower-level system hooks of the setup utility would be better able to muck with the drives, and this time it wouldn’t be copying any setup files onto the drive I intended to nuke. Unfortunately, that didn’t make a difference — the setup utility still stubbornly refuses to let me reformat the 2GB drive. And, once I’d started the setup process, I couldn’t get out of it, so now I’m starting over from scratch (which is why I was going from memory in the previous paragraph).
So, now I’ve got a 2GB drive which is essentially useless to me, as I can’t remove the installation of Windows 2000 from the drive to either just put the new install of Windows 2000 on that drive (which I’d rather avoid, as these days 2GB is fairly limiting for both the system and applications) or to use it for my documents and downloads.
Anybody out there know how I can reclaim those 2GB of space?
A suggestion from a co-worker: use a Win98 emergency boot disk (which, luckily, I can create here at work), boot off of that, and then use fdisk to nuke the drive in question. I think this should work, but it still bothers me that I have to resort to booting Win98 off of a floppy, rather than being able to do what I want with the tools and software I have at home (as I don’t own Win98, were it not for work, I’d still be SOL). More suggestions would still be appreciated…
Wudi, I hope you didn’t do this without calling me. Coulda saved you some hair-pulling.
DO NOT FDISK THE PARTITION. You will not be able to boot windows if you do that, as you’ll see that the C: contains ntldr, ntdetect.com, config.sys, io.sys, and other files necessary to boot Windows — thus the “System Drive” notation. Also, it probably contains “pagefile.sys”, your swap file. not necessarily a bad thing to have all by itself on that drive.
So you know, when windows writes its install information, it writes 0x80 (hex) to the Master Boot Record of the Primary (IDE Channel) Master disk. Even if you swap the two drives around, so that the other disk is the Primary Master, the 0x80 is still written to the Master Boot Record of the original C:, and will be the C: untill you change the Master Boot Record.
You don’t have to change anything, but if you want to fix your problem, you have to:
1) While powered off, switch your intended C: to Primary Master
2) boot from your win98 floppy, and run ‘fdisk /mbr’ to re-write the Master Boot Record. This is Non-Distructive, and will allow the new C: to be seen as the C: drive
3) re-install Win2k to get the drive where you want it.
To have done this correctly, you would have:
1) While powered off, switch your intended C: to Primary Master
2) boot from your win98 floppy, repartition AND run ‘fdisk /mbr’ to re-write the Master Boot Record.
3) boot from your win2k install media and run your install.
Call me if you need further help, like bootable media. Besides, I need help moving next week. ;-)