deleting a partition in network server?

[jlnewbie]

Our windows NT-4 network server has four 9.1 gig hard drives, total 36.4 gigs. These drives are partitioned in the following manner

EISA Utilities: - 36 mb
C Drive: - 4044mb
F: - 602mb
G: Shared - 3443mb
G: Shared - 4614mb
H: Users - 4614mb
G: Shared - 442mb
Free Space - 8236mb
totaling about 26 gigs,

My problem is twofold, I can't delete that partition, I get the following error, "the drive cannot be locked for exclusive use. And finally where is is the the additional 10 gigs. I'm somewhat of a novice with this so please be gentle


JLopez
Lopez31@ATC-Enviro.com
Environmental Services @ Your Service

 

[FilthPig]

If you're using RAID5, then one of the disks is being used for parity, and you will have disk space equal to the number of drives minus one. That might explain your missing 10(actually 9.1?)GB. If you are not using raid, do all of your disks show up in Disk Administrator?

How are you going about trying to delete the partition, and which partition are you trying to delete? Marc Creviere

 

[Guest_imported]

the 10 gig is used as parity bit, I think you have raid 5 configured. If you can tell me what partition I might be able to help

 

[jlnewbie]

thanks marc
i'm afraid it is Raid5 system, and that disk space is used for parity. I don't know enough about and I guess i'll be reading up on that now.
The partition i'm trying to detete is the f-partition via disk manager and delete partition. I say ok on the prompt and i get the error stated earlier.

JLopez
Lopez31@ATC-Enviro.com
Environmental Services @ Your Service

 

[Zelandakh]

You can only delete a partition if it is not in use.

The F drive will undoubtedly have a hidden share f$. Assuming there is no data on there in use by the OS, copy anything of value to another partition and bin everything you can. The OS will tell you what is in use and you won't delete it. Unshare anything that applies to that drive (use server manager to see the shares).

Once there is nothing there, remove the f$ share and you'll be able to delete F. Then go to disk admin and create a new partition as big as you can, commit it, set it to F and put the data back and set the f$ if you want.