you cannot format this volume

Question

After following the instructions of various dell technicians i have achieved no progress after reinstalling Vista home premium. The problems still remain. The updater fails and even updates from things like macafee result in BSOD and startup repair lingering for twenty minutes. I can't use this machine much, its a vostro 1500 laptop and is sixteen months old.

I am quite convinced that this is because Vista is not being reinstalled. After two attempts to reinstall vista, Dell told me that the hard drive was completely reformatted. THIS CANNOT BE TRUE. After all these attempts there is only 40GB in free drive space out of 136! After a disk cleanup I deleted over 50GB in "previous windows installations".

Now I've cleaned up the drive and vista and macafee alone just use up 36GB.

If the hard drive has been reformatted then there should be absolutely nothing on the hard drive except the operating system. I've been told many many times that I should resort to formatting the drive myself, erasing it totally then inserting the vista disc. I don't mind doing that, but whenever I try - (right click on the drive and select Format..." it comes up with the message: "You Cannot Format This Volume - It contains the version of Windows you are using."

Is there a way to get into the properties of the drive and make it so I can format it?

And do any of you agree that the reinstallations I've tried have not worked because of the hard drive refusing to reformat? - thus adding to the drive just being filled with more vistas, that just sit there?

m

Davet50 · Answer

You cannot format the OS drive while you are running the OS. You must do this from a boot up and not enter windows. That is why you are seeing the error. Remember a format erases the entire contents of the drive and since the program you are running to format the drive is on that driver you are in effect erasing that program while its running.

What you need to do is put your OS disk into the driver and boot up from it. At the beginning will be an option to choose the partition or drive to install windows on as well as a option to format the drive. This is the point at which you need to format the drive.

mikejc111 · Answer

Ok, so that makes sense but what about my feeling that on the two previous attempts of reinstallations did not reformat the drive?

Davet50 · Answer

unless you specify it normally there will not be a full format. just an over writing of the files.

Windows General

you cannot format this volume

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