Thread: hardrive partitions

Ok lets see what you guys got! I been getting my ass kick on trying to get a partition removed from a drive, heres the deal,this pc is a friend of mine who had gotten a major virus on the main system, this is a hewlitt packard pc ( the type where they like to save money and install the operating system on a partitioned hardrive) well the virus also got onto that part of the drive too, so i said no problem i'll just delete the partitions and just reinstall windows xp back on the hardrive using the cd,well thats not working so well, some how i don't know, but when they made that pc and used part of the hardrive to use for system recovery i canot for the life of me get rid or delete that partition, i have used a windows 98 boot floopy to try to delete it, didnt work! I have used patition majic to try to remove it, didn't work, i have used samsung hardrive software to reformat,delete,and create and new partition, didn't work, so what the hell can i do to remove this partition from this hardrive to where its just like a new hardrive as if i bought it from a store?

The Win 98 bootdisk will not work due to XP using the NTFS file system, assuming he didn't change anything upon purchasing the computer. Partition Magic is exactly what you need to get it done, but if you are using the CD inside windows, then that would be your problem. You need to boot the computer from the Partition Magic CD or create the recovery disks using the program. Once you do that you will see both partitions listed, from there you start with the 2nd partition and delete it, then the 1st; click apply and wait for the changes to take effect. Now you will have one big empty hard drive. Create a primary partition and make it NTFS. Once more click apply and wait for the changes to take effect. Now exit the program and put in your XP CD and reboot to start the install.

edit
I forgot, you also want to do a format /mbr to clean the master boot record just in case the virus got there.

Make sure when you get the HD totally clean that you make two partitions one for the OS and another for your data. You'll thank yourself later if you have to reinstall again.

Also make sure that the windows partition is about 15 gigs if you can afford the space. Nothing like being limited on download size because your Windows partition is too small (downloads go through the temp folder first).

ok i hooked up the hardrive to my own pc and use partition magic to delete and create the new partition on the hard drive go back and installed the drive into the Packard machine, same thing (WTF) this is something crazy also when i go to install windows, it says the drive is only 32 gigs but using the samsung disk manager software it says its 160 gigs which is its true size i really don't understand how the made the master boot for this hard drive, maybe the hardrive is bad? i dunno

you can use your favorite linux distro to trash the partition table in the MBR. it's pretty easy. there is a small (50MB) distro you can download pretty fast to do the trick if ya want. you can get it here.

The trick is to figure out which drive you want to trash. Once you do that, it's as simple as this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/{drive device} bs=1 count=512

the {drive device} above would be replaced by the device reference the system uses as that drive. if it's an IDE drive, it's easy to figure out:
primary master: hda
primary slave: hdb
secondary master: hdc
secondary slave: hdd
if it's a scsi drive, it's slightly different, but easy to figure out.

if ya want to go this route, i can give ya more help if you need. just lemme know. it's what i like about linux. it does EXACTLY what you tell it to do.

Originally Posted by zulg

ok i hooked up the hardrive to my own pc and use partition magic to delete and create the new partition on the hard drive go back and installed the drive into the Packard machine, same thing (WTF) this is something crazy also when i go to install windows, it says the drive is only 32 gigs but using the samsung disk manager software it says its 160 gigs which is its true size i really don't understand how the made the master boot for this hard drive, maybe the hardrive is bad? i dunno

When you say it worked when you hooked it up to your comp, do you mean that Partition Magic deleted both the primary and the recovery partition off the hard drive and you created one big NTFS partition? Then when you put it in the HP machine, you only see a 32 gig hard drive? Does your computer show it as a 32 gig hard drive? I am kinda confused. If your comp shows it at 160 but the HP does not, its not a bad drive. You might want to check for an updated bios from HP's web page if that is the issue. If not let me know