Hi,

I have one harddrive with two partitions. Both partitions have an installation of XP pro and both are fully updated.

However, the reason I created the secondary installation of XP was because the first (original installation) was having major faults that nothing and nobody seemed to be able to identify or indeed fix.

Anyway, now that I have my second instance of XP running I'd like to format the original partition so I can use the space it will provide.

I realise that the Boot.ini still resides on the primary partition and so will not allow the partition to be formatted. How can get around this? What steps can be taken?

Many Thanks

Hi mofo5000,

Welcome to PCHF.

One question, when you boot to your second partition, does this default to drive c or another drive letter?

Hi MadMonkey,

No the second partition does not default to C:. The drives are as follows

The primary partition has drive letter C: (that i want to wipe)

The secondary (which i want to keep as boot) is drive i:


I have had a read about and found that by using the winXP CD on boot it is possible to wipe partitions. However, I have no idea what effect this will have in Drive i: if i wipe drive C: via the suggested method.

Cheers

Hi mofo,

The important thing is to test after each stage.

Stage 1:
- Copy the boot.ini, io.sys, msdos.sys, ntdeect.com, ntldr.com from drive c: to drive i:
- Download: http://www.ranish.com/part/part240.zip and extract it to a bootable floppy disk. If you don't have a bootable disk you can download one from here: Bootdisk.Com - Free NTFS Boot disk, Boot Disk, Windows boot disk, XP Bootdisk, DOS Bootdisk (Windows 98 bootdisk would probably be best).
- Once you boot to the floppy disk, run part240
- You will see a * or > next to the partition that is flagged to boot. Select the secondary partition and press the B button.

Stage 2
- Rename boot.ini to boot.bak on the c: drive to make sure you still get the boot menu when you start up the PC.

Stage 3
- Your free for format the partition.

If you would like me to explain these in more detail, please let me know.

Hi Madmonkey,

I downloaded Part240 and and NTFS boot disk files.

I do not have a floppy drive so I burnt them to CD and set the bios to boot from CD ROM.

So restarted I hit F8 and booted in XP 'safe mode with command prompt' mode hoping this would help somehow.

I then went to D:\ and run part.exe. Frustratingly it prompted to install the software to a floppy drive!!!

How can I install part to a CD? It does not appear to allow change of drive letter?!

Sorry I missed this one mofo, is there any way you can borrow a floppy drive, or buy one, they are dirt cheap these days (Newegg.com - SONY Beige 1.44MB 3.5" Internal Floppy Drive Model MPF920 Beige - OEM)