I need some help with formating

maxclarkmaxclark In a hole in the ground
edited February 2011 in Hardware
Greetings.

I need some help.

So i got a new hard drive, and installed it successfully. I didnt remove windows from my other hard drive, but instead just installed a new windows copy on my new hard drive and made it so it would boot from that one instead. It works fine.

Now im trying to format my old hard drive, but it's not letting me. It gives me the "windows unable to complete format" error message. I imagine it's protected or something. I tried to do it in easeus partion but it's not letting me. What do i go about doing to be rid of the old windows and files on that hard drive?

Thanks

Comments

  • allenpanallenpan ThunderBay, Ontario, CAnada Icrontian
    edited February 2011
    this is what happen:

    initially you have HDD0 with system and boot record, now u add a 2nd Disk HDD1, now since HDD0 is already exist and as primary, now when u isntall OS on the HDD1 it basiclly create a link from HDD0 -> HDD1

    Boot:
    HDD0 -> (reading info, forwarding to HDD1)
    HDD1 -> Loading OS

    here is your problem, if u destroy or formate HDD0, how does computer know where to forward?, in reality u have a boot partition in HDD0 and System data in HDD1

    you can do this, swape the HDD physcial location or BIOS priority,
    example:

    Old HDD0 = SATA0
    new HDD1 = SATA1

    change to

    Old HDD0 = SATA1
    new HDD1 = SATA0

    the computer will attempt to boot from SATA0 but no luck, since it is missing Boot info, so u will get MBR or NSDT not found or somthing,

    pop in ur Win7/Vista/xp cd, do repairing MBR or just use the repiire option, and now it should boot.

    after boot u can kill ur old hdd (HDD1)

    or u can just change the priorty in BIOS to force boot from the New HDD, but no good in the long term, b/c people tend to forget ...
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