Hard Drive Question

[Sonic Valley]

Hey guys. I recently found a hard drive from an old session and want to re use it. SOme issues are preventing me from doing that however. It's been partitioned into two drives. How do I get it back to one drive? Also having problems formatting it. I get errors saying that some programs may be using the drive tho it's now empty. Any suggestions?

[MrM]

If it is NTFS formatted, there could be files 'flagged' as if they are still linked to a certaon OS (which clearly is not the reality, but NTFS doesn't know that)

I assume you will NOT want to use its current data?
Then the best way to reformat is with partition magic, or similar software.

[Sonic Valley]

Ya..i just need to merge the partitians. Looked at a few but cripes they're all demo's. Any suggestions for a free one? I need it for like this one frick'n task...lol

[TCONNELLY]

I vote for partition magic too. It costs, but you get what you pay for (in this case, no partitions done cleanly and efficiently) and who knows, you may even use it again. If you only use it once, rest assured in the knowledge that you keep legit people like this in business.
Just my $.02
Tim

[Sonic Valley]

I'm not paying for it. I'm not gonna blow 80 bucks on something that I'm going to use once for 30 seconds...

thanx anyway for the suggestions guys.

[jmail]

If you've got Win2K (NT also), and I think XP, hook-up your hard disk, use a floppy emergency boot disk (possibly even the install CD for the OS) and get Fdisk going from that (command line). Destroy all the partitioning with it. You may not be able to create partitions with it, but no matter if you can't. Re-boot into the gui with your regular boot drive and go to the Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management (?) and right click on the drive you just emptied. It should give you the choices for creating a partition(s) in the unallocated area(s) (formatting, also). If you're in Win98, you can partition up to a 120gig drive, I think, with Fdisk. I have no idea about Mac OSs. Just be sure you're on the correct disk (unlike me one time) prior to the fdisk option to delete partitioning. All of this is destructive to data, of course.

[KX]

Get a new drive! You'll use it more than 30 sec...and could be use as an extra backup.

[Sonic Valley]

lol...I'm not buying a new drive when i have a perfectly fine one here. I just want to merge the partitions...

[Tekker]

I'm with jmail. If you're not interested in keeping any data on the drive, then just wipe both of the partitions with fdisk and start fresh. Best way to do it for free.

-tkr

[xpine73]

If u dont wanna keep anything on both partitions, why not try DM which is an old but effective disk tool.
And it is free.

Simply boot up from a DOS or win98 bootable floppy then run DM.
But be careful to choose the right driver that u wanna deal with in DM. Otherwise it will be definitely a tragedy!

Cheers

[jpw23]

Fdisk..........low level format, then let xp do a ntfs format or fat32, your choice.