Hard disc access
geo85pca - 30 October 2008 - 4:44pm
I have replaced the hard disc of my Dell Dimension 5100, and done a clean install of Vista home premium, which is runing reasonably well.
I have connected the old SATA disc which is recognised by device manager and shown as having three partitions: 1 healthy (EISA), 2 healthy (active primary partition) 3 healthy (primary partition). I would like to reformat the disc which had OEM XP and data which I have copied over on DVDs.
I'm unable to access the drive which I believe is something to do with the OEM installation.
Can any one offer a solution to this problem?
geo85pca
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Disk Manager
Isitme - 31 October 2008 - 3:00pmDoes the disk show in the Disk Manager? If it does, right click each partition and select Delete partition. This will leave you with the whole space shown as unallocated, which you can now partition as you require or simply Format the whole disk.
TomD
Hard disc access
geo85pca - 2 November 2008 - 12:31pmThanks TomD
Yes it shows in Disc Manager, Ican delete partitions 2 (programmes etc.) and 3 (Dell help files I think). However R clicking partition 1 only brings a link to help, and Disc Manager doesn't allocate a drive letter to the disc.
I wonder if the format function on the vista installation CD would work? Obviously I would disconect the present C: drive.
GeoC
Disk Manager
Isitme - 2 November 2008 - 4:12pmI think it is probably being recognized as a system partition, which is protected, so you can't delete it. You will be able to do this with the Vista DVD as you suggest or with the disk manufacturers disk configuration utility. If you don't have the latter, then use the Vista disk and pull the plug before it starts to install the OS.
TomD