Was at my friends house as he was hooking up a computer he got from another friend. The thing had a 3.5" floppy (A) drive, the CD was on (G) drive, there was a tape drive and one hard drive that seem to be spread over B, C, D, E, and F drives. The guy that gave him the computer said the hard drive needs to be unpartitioned by using DOS commands???
Any Help?
Thanks
B&I
AFAIK from my days with FDISK the only way to unpartition a drive it to remove any partitions which has the effect of erasing all the data.
Partition Magic works very nicely and is far, far and is less time consuming than screwing around with fdisk.
Let’s try that link again
Partition magic may be a bit more user friendly, and I think can even do things like combine all of the drives into one partition without losing data, but the plain old ordinary FDISK will do what you want it to. As Padeye mentioned it will erase all of the data on the disk. FDISK has another advantage that you probably already have it, where you would have to buy partition magic.
The thing that gets FDISK into trouble is when the drive was partitioned by an operating system other than win 9.x. If there are logical partitions that are not FAT, FDISK gets into this catch 22 where it tells you that logical drives exist but then when you go to delete them it can’t figure out what they are so it says they don’t exist. But it won’t let you remove the primary partition they are in until you do delete them, so at that point FDISK is stuck.
However, usually people partition drives like that because they are FAT and have a 2 gig limit for an OS like win 95. If it’s partitioned as C,D,E, and F, I’m guessing that it’s an 8 gig drive. The thing that bothers me is you said it’s partitioned as B,C,D,E, and F. B is usually the second floppy drive. If it’s really C,D,E, and F, and they are all FAT partitions, FDISK will be simple enough to use.
If you do use FDISK, just delete all of the logical partitions first, then delete the primary partition, then make one big primary partition that uses the entire drive. You will need at least the win98 version of FDISK. An old DOS or win95 version can’t create FAT32 partitions. Make the partition active, then reboot the computer, format the partition, install your OS, and you’re on your way.
For a free partition manipulation program I suggest Partition Resizer. It has always worked for me. More bare bones than PQMagic but it is free.
First change your C: partition to FAT32 or whatever is needed. Then move as much stuff off of D: as you can to C:. Then shrink D: and expand C:. Repeat. When a partition is empty, delete it.
Note that apps that assume stuff is on another partition will need to be told where stuff is. Look in .ini files, the registry, etc. If you have the OS installed on something other than C:, leave it there. There are “partition mover” programs but they don’t always work as advertised.
Note that drive letters for CDRoms etc. can be fixed in System Properties.
WOW
Thanks for all the help!
e_g_c I am not exactly sure how, as in what letters, are being used except I’m sure about the a drive and the CD on the G drive. I just assumed that the letters between A and G were the ones used for the hard drive, and one for the tape drive.
Oh yeah. He has Windows 98.
Is it obvious, or are there help type windows, on how to do the FAT thing?
Thanks Again,
B&I
Partition Magic… IT folks don’t call it “Partition Tragic” for nothing!
Partition Magic has worked perfectly for me through several different verisons and several different OS’s, and loads of different PCs and configurations. To the best of my knowledge it is generally highly regarded as a powerful, stable program.
What kind of problems are the IT staff having with it?
If they are like our IT staff the problem is that it is not made by MSFT. Find a tool 10x better and 1/8 the cost and they still hate it.
PQMagic is a less than robust product in situations where things “aren’t quite right.” And since things are rarely perfectly right, PQMagic goes south fairly often. The way partition tables are defined and the MS OSes expects partition tables to be defined are two different things. (Same company, different brains.) Also, there are a lot of interpretations as to how the BIOS should report certain key values. Different HD makers set up drive translation differently, etc. Sometimes PQMagic will just give a “partition table” error and not run at all. Other times you aren’t so lucky.
Well, as ftg said, PM is indeed “is a less than robust product” at times. Older versions (4.x, 5.x) weren’t smart enough to stop if a problem arose - it just did its thing anyway - usually with catastrophic results. Older versions of PM also didn’t warn users of things it wasn’t capable of - for instance, using PM 5.x to resize an XP NTFS (which is NTFS… 3.1? I think?) partition always results in catastrophic failure (because out of the box PM 5 only understands NT NTFS, can be patched to understand 2000 NTFS (3.0) but draws the line there).
Trust me… I’ve hung out at Ars Technica since 1999 and have read story after story of the woe caused by PM. Newer versions are much better, but if given the choice between using PM and say, using Ghost to image the partition, resizing the partition using any other tool and reimaging to the new partition, I’ll do that. After all, you can easily use Ghost to verify the image file after doing an image and put it back on the new partition (or any other disk for that matter) without having to worry too much about losing the data… But if PM has a problem… I hope you made a backup!
Serious question though - does PM do the “4kb alignment for FAT32” thing? I have been under the impression that it doesn’t, which is why I use BootITNG for any disk partitioning needs… if it gets to that.
The golden rule with any partitioning program is, “If the data is valuable, back it up!” I’ve had PM go wrong on me a couple of times and I simply re-imaged the workstation, resized partitions, installed the apps, and restored the data. Yes, it took me some time, but so what?