I need help deleting an operating system thats on another partition!! please!!

[wakaboom]

Ok well i got windows xp pro and win2k i want to delete win2k so i can free up some space and everytime i try to format it says something like this partition could not be delete it and ive even tryed doing it from the xp cd and it stills says the same thing i really need help apreciate it

[mike_sanfil]

Try downloading the free verion of, KILLDISK. It's a DOS program that will write zeros to your hard drive. Should clear everything out.

edit-------

Did you already install win xp, and just want to get rid of the win2k partition? If you can't back up your data and start over, have you tried FDisk?

[Detritus]

If you have a win 98 boot disk you may be able to do it with fdisk as well, just make sure you delete the correct partition.

[wakaboom]

OK i will try thank you guys for you fast reponses

[sechs]

Why do people insist on suggesting the use these antequated utilities?

If Windows won't format the volume, then there is probably some fine reason for that (like its your boot volume or has a page file on it or there is a hardware error). Just zapping the disk is not necessarily a good idea.

I'd suggest first checking the disk out with the manufacturer's utilities.

Do you recall exactly what errors you were getting? What is the partition layout of your disks?

[LeftCoast]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sechs

Why do people insist on suggesting the use these antequated utilities?

Because they work. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, especially if all you want to do is something simple (like get rid of a partition).

wakaboom, make sure to take careful note of the drive name and size, so you don't zero-out the wrong drive when using Killdisk. Also, you'll need to format the zeroed drive, but you can easily do that from within Windows, with XP's Disk management tool.

[sechs]

If the wheel didn't work right on newer behicles or also destroyed houses when used incorrectly, people might consider reinventing it!

Nobody is in a hurry to royally muck up their computer.... try to find out what's wrong and fix it, rather than brute forcing a solution.

[HeadBand]

the reason is because windows will see the security of the ntfs partition but dos will just see it as a non dos drive and be able to reformat it as a dos drive...once its FAT you can then reformat it in windows as ntfs

[Detritus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HeadBand

the reason is because windows will see the security of the ntfs partition but dos will just see it as a non dos drive and be able to reformat it as a dos drive...once its FAT you can then reformat it in windows as ntfs

Bingo, I had this problem on a previous build where I installed XP on two different drives (accidnentally long story) and had to reformat one of the drives, XP wounldn't do it. So I used an old Win 98 boot disk and that blew it away.