FDISK wont delete partitions

[mark01]

I am having problems with fdisk. I have this 2 gig hd that I used for a dual boot system. I used 500 MB for linux (partitions with linux's disk druid), and the other for windows 2000.(this disk was a slave to a 4 gig drive) Well I used fdisk /mbr & fdisk to reformat the drive, then I formated it, and it said I have 2 GB free. Now I used this as a master on a new machine, ran fdisk and it still shows that I had 500MB of a non-dos partition. I deleted that, but now I cannot delete the primary and extended partitions. (primary=1.4 gig, extended=81MB) I wanted to delete these so that I have the full 2GB, but I tried all of the menu's in fdisk, and it wont let me delete them. When I try to delete the extended partition, it says, "cannot delete because there are logical drives", I try to delete a logical drive, it says there is none selected, I try to delete the primary, it says, "cannot delete primary because there is an extended present"
Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this???

 

[ngagne]

Classic example of fdisk's inability to format non-FAT partitions.

I have done it sucessfully, but I wouldn't even know where to start. Try a third party prog like Partition Magic, it's your easiest bet. Nate Gagne
ngagne@numa-inc.com

Like my post? Let me know it was helpful!

 

[ceh4702]

Just use the Linux Set-up disk to format it to dos32 instead of what you did. Then quit the rest of the setup. I think Linux can format to the DOS format. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[jaeddy]

Wondows NT/2000 setup will do this for you a well. Get to the part where you select the partition and deletel them all at that point, then create the partition you want and bail out of the setup program. As noted above fdisk has a poor history of dealing with non-dos partitions, particularly extended partitions. Any of the suggstions provided in this thread should work just fine.

 

[ramani]

HI
Yet another way...
If the BIOS has LOW-LEVEL formating feature... you can do a low-level format and then do the FDISK.

Yet another method is you download from the HD manufacturer site, the disk manager utility. Then run this. EZ.exe or DM.exe does this.

I have used these two methods, and the other suggestions (USE NT boot disks, Linus setup disks... proceed up to formating the disk.. and then cancel setup).
All these work successfully.
ramani :-9
(Subramanian.G),FoxAcc, ramani_g@yahoo.com

 

[bdux]

Be careful with doing a low level format from bios as some hard drives use a drive translation and you need the manufacturers low level format utility to low level format without damaging the drive translation