Please help me format my HD!!!

[Guest Aerolee]

Guys, I'm going to lose my mind, I can't play any games (most importantly fs) because the second partition of my hard drive won't format. I get the eroor "windows was unable to complete the format" (to local disk D).Here's the story behind this. A long time ago, I upgraded my pc, so I decided to reinstall windows, but windows would never finish installing for some reason, but everything still worked normal so being my lazy self i operated the computer with windows always trying to finish its instalation. Until finally windows wouldn't let me write anything to my d drive (where I keep my programs like fs), in other words I couldn't install anything. So I fianlly took my pc to a friend who had to reinstal windows from scratch (new instalation). But after the instalation I still had all my files (programs won't work because they were erased from XP's registry, but I just had to reinstall them to the same folder because all of the programs files remained). This was on both my C and D drives. But same old thing, couldn't write or access anything on D, so I decided to format it. And back to my problem, it won't format so i cant access it. This is really driving me nuts because I dont have enough room on my C drive to install FS and I really want to play.I've tried everything I can think of, I dont have antivirus running, I've done a format through windows, through DOS, through safe mode, etc.... But always the same thing, gets to 100% then says "windows was unable to complete the format".Can someone please help me!!!P.S. - sorry if this is confusing and jumbled, i'm really tired right now.

[Guest james_2k]

hi,my advice, wipe the whole thing, merge the partitions into one, you do not need multiple partitions at all, they can only create problems as far as im concerned. that will do the trick hopefully, the windows xp installer can sort your partitions out for you, hope this helps, James

[Guest LilSki]

It may be permissions. I had an issue some time ago where mysteriously I could not delete anything on one of my drives. After turning on advanced file permisions in XP I found an unknown user had ownership of my drive. I changed ownership to admin and tightened my security a bit and all has been good. If the drive is NTFS the permission will remain even after a format of the OS. As for multiple partitions it is the only way to go. It allows a fresh OS without losing everything. I will never do single partition on any machine I build. Hope something helped!!KevinLIC

[Guest james_2k]

no way! if two partitions are required then buy two hard drives! the os should be installed with nothing else on the hard drive in my opionion as it reduces the scope for compatibility problems. if you need to keep music and other files then copy them to cd first. its nice to have a clean machine! and im not sure if thats the case, re: the ntfs wiping, formatting removes all permissions, i have done it enough! James

[Cruachan 705]

Sorry James, but I'm afraid I disagree strongly.I have two HDs. The 60Gig drive has two partitions - XP Home is installed on its own 6Gig partition and the other partition is used for various permanent progs and software including all my flight sims.The second drive is a 40Gig drive and is used for all my backups, various transitory software and the main windows page file.This was all created over a year ago and I have experienced no problems whatsoever. It makes the various regular housekeeping tasks so much easier and I am sure contributes greatly to the overall stability and performance of XP.Mike

[Guest LilSki]

What I meant by keeping the NTFS permissions is: If say on my machine which is setup just as mike descriibed, if I format my OS partition the other 50 gig partition on the drive is unafected and the permission remain the same. Thus even if you format your OS any other drives or partitions will still have the permissions, and as the first post described the problem remained the same after a freshly installed XP. If he cannot erase anything on the drive. I would venture to say the drive is seriously messed up or it is a permission issue. This drive setup is simply the best. program folders remain the same, all your settings aftr a format remain after the program is reinstalled. There is no compatability issue at all. Installing programs is as simple as changing C: to D:. Not installing stuff to the OS partition keeps it from fragmenting and slowing down. Kevin

[Guest james_2k]

hmm, well i have two 40 gig drives in a striping raid array, but they are in one big partition, i tried having a separate one for my swap file but there was no performance increase. its really down to personal choice in the end, but i still think that kevin should merge the partitions and format in one big go as this shold sort it out, and if it doesnt then his drive is probably screwed, James

[Guest james_2k]

hmm, well i have two 40 gig drives in a striping raid array, but they are in one big partition, i tried having a separate one for my swap file but there was no performance increase. its really down to personal choice in the end, but i still think that kevin should merge the partitions and format in one big go as this shold sort it out, and if it doesnt then his drive is probably screwed, James

[Guest p_r_johnson]

Go here, young feller:-http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/I will eat my hat if this won't fix it.....PJ

[Cruachan 705]

LOL.......I hesitated to make the same suggestion as it involved probably unwelcome additional expenditure. However, if this is not an issue then I agree wholeheartedly - I've used it many times to delete/create/resize partitions and it works like a charm. Just be certain you purchase a version that is compatible with XP (version 7.0 is fine).Mike