Deleted partition = Dead drive?

tizz

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Jan 19, 2008
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Hey everyone,

Just went to format my main drive. It had windows 7 ultimate on there, with 2 partitions, boot and programs.
Loaded Win 7 DVD, went threw and viewd the 2 partitions, deleted both then expected to see one big "Unpartitiond Space" label... but nothing was there.

Went back and tried again, but no drive shows up at all, although its present in the Bios, and at boot listed before the DVD loads.

I tried loading the driver from the MOBO, but it says its not licenced after i select it, even though its freshly downloaded of nvida's site ... ( using a evga nForce 680i sli mobo) so windows 7 wont use it.


I took the drive out, pluged it into my USB caddy and pluged it inot my netbook im currently on hoping I could just format the ah heck. It picks up the drive and shows its a samsung spinpoint drive etc, but says its 0mb, and just apears like lost or dead, its there under disk managment but it shows no space on the drive at all ! :S

Not sure why deleting the partitions have caused the drive to not throw up them as free space now to format, very confused as what to do to get this back and to format it!

Any help I would be so happy for.

Tizz
 

tizz

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Ok geting somewhere... used some software to recover the partitions, got them back.. but the MBR i think is fooked.

Got a fair few unalocated chunks atm and one big free space block too when viewing the drive in computer management. Trying to stitch them all together now and format the damn thing!

Fun way to spend my evening when i have the flu! :)
 

Jonmor68

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"Not sure why deleting the partitions have caused the drive to not throw up them as free space now to format"
You MUST have a partition before you can format it.
You deleted the 2 partitions but neglected to create a new one in the available space.
Boot in with your W7 disk use the custom instalation option to access the disk tools and choose create new partition.
Once you have created a new partition you can format it, although W7 should do it aoutomaticly. If you want to format it choose quick format otherwise on new large drives you could be there for hours.
 

tizz

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no noooo, I know that! there was no avalible space to create one with!! it was blank :S

I had to restore the previous partitions using some software, then delete them again using windows disk manager and then tried again, seems to be ok now.

Originaly after deleting them , it didnt give me any space to create new ones etc, so i couldnt! :( was worried the drive had died weirdly
 

tizz

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Exactly!!! lol . I deleted them... then ... the space was all gone, that was my issue, the drive displayed it as having absolutly no space , in any way.

I've managed to sort it out now, spent all evening recovering it and trying again... fingers crossed its not on its way out and the OS installs ok
 

4745454b

Titan
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But thats just it. Once the partitions are gone you're free to make a new one, as large as the drive can hold or as small as you want. I don't see how you can delete them and not have room to make more.
 

tizz

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4745454b ... I dont know how to make it clearer, but that was my issue.. It wasnt i didnt have room to create one.. the drive was displaying itself as a 0mb HDD, there was physicaly nothing i could do, that was my issue and question to people asking how to get the drive back to a "out the box" state if you will.

Ta Apache, thats prety much what i had to do, took a while, but all back and running today with a few 2 partitions on the drive and win 7 running smoothly.

Panic over, no idea why the drive threw a wobbly but at least its not dead yet! lol
 

bretmaverick999

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Oct 4, 2011
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Much easier solution to the same problem (except WinXP).

During install I deleted existing partitions, selected entire disk for new partition, and when it tried to do the extensive format it just sat at 0%, for like an hour. Power cycling started to load WinXP but as it tried to detect hardware the hard disk light came on and stayed on, and an hour later nothing. Repeated last steps with same result. Googled here and found this thread.

Easier solution:
- boot MS-DOS 6.2, run fdisk, delete all partitions, create new partition (20Meg FAT-16, oh yes, the days of old).
- put WinXP CD back, Control-Alt-Delete, WinXP sees FAT-16 partition, delete it and proceed like things should work.

Exactly what Tizz said, the normal partition delete/create steps put the hard disk disk in an unusable state.