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September 7th, 2008 12:00
formatting hard drive
hii.. my problem is little complicated.. please bear with me..
i have a dell optiplex gx270 with windows xp.
i have a 80 gb hard disk, partitioned into 34 and 40 gb.
i wanted to completely reload my windows, so i transferred all data from D: to C:(this had the os), formatted D:, installed xp in it.. transferred all data from C: to D:.... so far so good.
next when i formatted the c drive(which is no lonher the boot drive).. it formatted it till the end.. but at last showed. wndows cannot format the drive...
and after this its showing the free space as 28 gb instead of 34 gb.. there are no files( visible or hidden) on the drive.
can any one tell me why is this happening???
AlanKS
241 Posts
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September 7th, 2008 21:00
When you set up Windows to boot from the secondary partition this does not entirely mean what it says.
A standard computer BIOS after completing the initial tests (known as POST, Power On Self Test) passes control to the 1st bootable device as defined in the BIOS settings which can be the FDD, CD and HDD depending on what you have fitted and how you have set it up. You wil note however that as far as the HDD is concerned there is only one option and that is the whole hardware unit, not a specific partition.
The only partition on an HDD that can truely boot is the 1st partition and in older operating systems this was the only option. When you set up newer Windows O/S it appears to give you the option to boot from the second primary partition but this is a slight trick. In order for the second partition to hold the O/S a bootstrap loader has to be installed on the Primary partition which then points to the second partition. This means you cannot actually format the 1st partition or you would lose the loader. Windows is aware of this so prevents you doing so.
Just for further info this is particularly important if you are trying to do this with two separate drives. We have seen several case where users have removed the 1st drive and setting the second in its place when trying to upgrade their system. Unfortunately the second drive depends on the loader on the removed disk and will not work without it.