I recently added an EIDE hard drive to my existing SATA win 7-64 system. Windows found the new drive added a driver for it and found the boot record and OS. I have tried to delete the boot partition but windows will not let. I managed to delete the drive, but win found it again and reinstalled the drivers and told me to reboot. How can I reformat that drive so that windows does not see it as a boot drive and let me use it for other things?

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If you want it bad, you get it bad

When Windows 7 sees an XP drive, it keeps the protection from the old user. You may have to take posession of the drive. I just had to do it a few weeks ago. Did you try reformatting the drive? (Right click on the drive in my computer and select format) I think you can take pasession of the drive by right clicking on it and selecting properties. There was a tricky combination of what to check off, and it took me 15 or 20 minutes to bumble through the settings until I got it right. All I waqs trying to do was copy my customes files off, so they could be added to another computer. It may be a good security factor, but it was a huge pain to get around.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Have you tried wiping and zapping from IBM works every time
http://ftp.build.bg/Drivers/IBM/downloads.htm
It will wipe and zap every sector on the hard drive you then can use windows to format it runs dos so remove the other drives power cable to be safe that it won't zap and wipe them instead after the old drive has been done reconnect all your drives and format the zaped and wiped drive.

You can also just try dropping the partition ...

I think it finds it every time because the first partition on that drive is active. You'll have to deactivate it. Try using Diskpart (from a command line) with the inactive command. Do deactivate the correct drive! if you change the Windows drive by accident, you can't boot from it anymore.

See technet on diskpart for commands.

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When recycling used drives I use Darik's Boot & Nuke from http://www.dban.org ... but if you do it, be sure & unplug the drives you want to keep the data on. A deep sector erase (followed by format in the OS) seems to do older used drives some good.

Jason

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

There is a way to do this. It wipes out track zero sector zero by zeroing the first 512 bytes in the disk. This sector contains the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the drive. This was used to remove some difficult to remove viruses. There is a small batch file to do this.

Go to http://linuxgazette.net/issue63/okopnik.html and follow the instructions.

WARNING: This will wipe out the drive, you will end up with a virgin drive. Absolutely nothing on it will be accessible.

WARNING 2: The instructions for the DOS version are not quite complete. I have searched my drives and cannot find the original of this, which is very detailed and explains this thoroughly, including several caveats and a complete explanation of which drive is the target. You will need DEBUG.EXE and very likely a DOS bootable disk. Should you fail to set the drive right you may end up with a blank boot drive. You are working at the lowest level of assembly language possible, manipulating the CPU hardware directly.

Somewhere I have a DOS bootable diskette that is complete, including the debug.exe executable. I will continue looking for it and, if I find it, I will PM you and try to get you the information.


This is really ancient stuff

had no problems when I upgraded all rigs to Win 7 both 32 & 64 bit.

right click on my computer, click on manage/disk management, delete volume, reformat.

Yes, they were all XP boot drives, i just added them as secondary drives to Win 7.

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