re: I want to format the slave drive
Wednesday, December 7, 2005 at 5:11 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by John Van Goethem
(5 messages posted)
Thanks for the info...essentially that's what the message is implying when I try
to format...it tells me that I can't because I must close all utilities that are
using the drive which can't happen because I would be shutting the computer off to
do so. I suppose removing the slave, replacing C with the slave and leave C out
until I reformat the slave might work. A lot of hassle though because I have over
135 GB of unused disk between the two and I can use both for storage.
On Tuesday, December 6, 2005 at 6:59 pm, Steve B wrote:
>So it seems your XP that you are running is on the old (E) drive and you don't have
>an XP install on the new (C) drive. Well you could install XP on C, if that's what
>you want to do. If you think the E drive will last a while and want to keep XP
there,
>you can delete most everything on C. Well everything you can see from Windows Explorer
>without enabling the showing of hidden system files. You can't reformat C though
>without a lot of hassle because the three magic, and hidden, boot files are there.
> ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini.
>
>Microsoft's terminology is confusing, but they call the first drive the boot drive.
> Most every BIOS will begin the boot process by reading the MBR (master boot record)
>from the first drive. This is generally called C, and Microsoft also calls it the
>"boot" drive. The MBR is executed and reads and executes ntldr which then reads
>boot.ini. The OS (XP in your case) can be installed anywhere, and the partition
>it's on is referred to as the "system" disk by Microsoft.
>
>XP won't let you format either the "boot" or "system" disks as it would effectively
>be commiting suicide.
>
>
>
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 | | | |  | re: I want to format the slave drive (John Van Goethem: Wed, Dec 7, 2005, 5:11 am) |
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