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how to delete my partition table?

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9 replies

by icelemon

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hello. after using norton ghost restoring my drive C, it left without restoring back the "temp" partition and messed up the partition table.

now im having this partition table problem, so im planning to destroy the partition table then repartitioning it and reinstalling windows.

for which even from start it seems helpless with fdisk or with Parition magic. both of them would say it is impossible to write to disk, i have even used an utility called "Super Fdisk". which seems hopeless too, it says "error writing to disk".

what can i do to help in this situation?

9 replies

by mizo_rizo

If you are using Norton Ghost 2003 with SATA Drive this will fail loading the 2M Partition and you need to set your active partition by fdisk and choosing the option 2 and change the active one
If your case is to distroy the data you may try the gdisk.exe dos utility that exists in the norton ghost folder

by icelemon

thanks for your answer, unforuntately it is an IDE 2.5" toshiba drive for laptops. i have also tried gdisk but it didn't help

by hal 9000

There are also several Wiping utilities available from the HDD makers which will write 0 to every sector in DOS this should fix your problem.

However if this is a SATA HDD you will have to make up a Boot Disc with the SATA Drivers on it before you can do anything at all that could be your problem currently as SATA drives are not seen under conventional DOS Utilities as the drivers just didn't exist way back them. PM and Ghost unless you have the latest don't see SATA drives either.

Col

by cmiller5400

try DBAN. It will wipe your drive by writing a random pattern to all sectors. (secure data destruction)

by icelemon

i tried using the method you described, it did a marvelous job. but now i can't create partitions using fdisk no more.

by zlitocook

If you have a SATA drive, you can tell by opening the case and lokking at the cable connected to the hard drive. If it is a thin wire cable, it mabie red. It is a SATA, if it is a longer or wider thin cable, it should have a red line next to the power connector. Then you have an IDE cable, and may have other problems.
Here is a walk through on how to use your SATA drive when installing XP.

Copy the drivers from motherboard support CD *\DriverDisk\SATA\*.* into root directory of floppy disk. (i.e. root directory of floppy disk should contain \pide and \sata folders, txtsetup.oem, etc. files.)

Then, boot system by Windows XP installation CD, when the message "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" shows up, press "F6". Then, press "S" to specify additional device when next screen pops up. Put the driver floppy disk you made in and press enter to continue. If the floppy disk is made successfully, the installation program will ask for selecting driver. Please then select "VIA Serial ATA RAID Controller(Windows XP)".) After SATA driver loaded and Windows XP can recognize the SATA HDD, you can continue to install Windows XP as usual.
If this will not work let me know and I will suggest other things.

by icelemon

thanks for your answer, unforuntately it is an IDE 2.5" toshiba drive for laptops.

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