Formatting old HDD

voyagerfan99

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
I just got ahold of a 250GB SATA drive. I have my old windows install on the 120GB ATA drive. I did a ghost and successfully got my drives managed and whatnot.

My problem now is that I want to format the old drive, but MaxBlast and WD Data Saver won't let me because it contains a boot table. How do I format this old drive? (Should I just delete the boot.ini file?)
 
Dump the old primary with GParted if you have to if the XP drive tool when booting up with the install disk won't. Then you can easily create a new primary or extended partition depending on if you plan to continue using it and use the Disk Management tool to see that formatted.

GParted live for cd is a great tool to have onhand anyways for Windows XP, Vista, and certainly any plans for any Linux distros like seeing the latest 8.04 release of ubuntu. Make sure to grab the 0.3.3.0 release since that was the last cross platform besides the 0.3.2.0 just before that since it can create MS partitions as well as VFat for Linux and other OSs. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

The general instructions are easy to follow for the 35mb iso image you download at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/generalities/gparted.htm For some additional screenshots, http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

That will save going out to buy a retail product like Partition Magic if you don't already have a 3rd party drive program.
 
You should be able to use computer management/my computer to format the drive from windows as long as it's been boot from.
 
If you plan to try a reformat with a right click on the 120 in the Disk Management tool first make sure the sata drive is set as the default hard drive in the drive list found in the bios not just setting hard drive first in the boot order. Otherwise the original copy of Windows will likely be what loads being that ide overrides sata by default. You certainly don't want to end up reformatting the wrong drive while being booted up in the wrong copy of Windows.
 
I just downloaded GParted and deleted the partition. I then booted back into windows and used MaxBlast to format the drive. Now I have 120GB of extra storage space! :)
I know the SATA drive had taken over because the boot screen only stayed up for about 3 seconds, unlike the usual 15 on the IDE drive.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
I just downloaded GParted and deleted the partition. I then booted back into windows and used MaxBlast to format the drive. Now I have 120GB of extra storage space! :)
I know the SATA drive had taken over because the boot screen only stayed up for about 3 seconds, unlike the usual 15 on the IDE drive.
Click to expand...

Well at least we have solved the question. :P:)
 
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