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Partition Problem

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by pen_pal777

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I accidently removed my primary non-dos partition without first deleting the logical Dos partition. I recreated an active partition to see if I could than delete the logical partition. But when I fdisk it says the logical partition can not be deleted. I have tried every option with fdisk. Now I can only use about 10 mb of a 2gb harddrive. Does any one know of another way to remove the logical Dos partition? Any one know of any utilities I can use? Thanks.

15 replies

by bstayskal

I suggest trying Powerquest's Partition Magic. Whenever I have problems with fdisk, I'll use Partition Magic, and vice versa, to resolve the issues. It might work...it might not. Good luck.

by alee100

There is a utility called delpart.exe that I have used in similiar situations. It is on some older startup disks, or it might be available on Microsoft's site.
Hope this helps.

by bouchard

look in your BIOS and see if you can LOW-LEVEL format the drive. this will delete any previous setings you may have had.

use with caution! Some seagate drives don't like to be low-level formated. personaly i believe this to be a myth.

by wlbowers

Boot to dos with a disk that has fdisk on it. Type:
fdisk /mbr
This should replace the master boot record and allow you to enter fdisk and do your thing.
If this doesn't work there is a utility called DrivePro that has a feature that allows youto erase the first 10 tracks of the drive. This is where it keeps the mbr. Once Drivepro has cleaned these tracks you shouldn't have any problems.

Good Luck Lee

by rickmother

I suggest going to the drive makers web site and download their utility software for this. You'll need a boot disk handy and if you want to use FAT 32 it needs to be Win 95b or better. Most of the drive maker utilities are self booting and are menu driven, so it shouldn't be to hard to reformat your drive and gain all of your disk space back. They usually prompt you for DOS or Windows boot disk when there ready to format so have one ready. I would stay away from the low level format option listed below, this usually voids any warranty your drive may have, most have a 3 year warranty, but they do vary by makers.

by fatherfox

Personally, I boot to a linux cd like RedHat6.0 or Mandrake and use the fdisk or disk druid to fix problems like that. You can even recover deleted partitions with a linux cd. I have. When in doubt, just wipe out the whole disk, commit the changes, then restart with no partitions booting to a Windows boot disk if that's the type of partitions you want and fdisk /mbr and fdisk as normal. just doing fdisk /mbr in m$ never got rid of logical drives or non-dos partitions for me. All it does is correct mbr errors or replace the records another installer has (re)written.

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