Being unable to find any information on my problem anywhere else, I have resorted to posting on this board.

I'm a second year Computer Programming student with some experience in Computer Repair.  My father bought a new hard drive and installed it as a slave in his system.  Being the brillant man that he is, he decided to install Windows XP on the new drive and leave Windows 98SE on the other drive.  Well, all was fine until he decided he wanted to make some ADDITIONAL partitions.  This is where it gets confusing.

I have no idea what he did but it got to the point where there were 2 versions of XP installed on the same Hard drive and it was impossible to reformat the drive that had 98 on it.  So, he came to me.  I managed to fdisk both drives but something was strange.  The original drive that was in the system was working just fine except the BIOS would only register it as a 2gig instead of a 30gig when it was the master.  The new drive, a 40gig, had a partition on it that I couldn't get rid of, leaving the primary partition with only 2gigs.

I got it all up and running but 2gig with Windows XP on it fills up fast.  So I installed Partition Magic 8.0 Pro to try and fix the problem because I have used it before to fix other partition size problems with a 0% failure rate.  I ran it and it changed the size of the drives perfectly but when it rebooted, Windows XP brought up a BLUE SCREEN that told me a drive size had changed.  I rebooted like it told me and the screen came up again.  So I tried a boot disk, that LOCKED up.  I tried Safe Mode, that locked up.  I tried the Windows XP installation disc and even that locked up.

Have any of you ever had a similiar experience?  Was it repairable?  Is there a way to erase a hard drive without being able to boot it up?

Please, bare in mind, that I've tried the hard drive in other computers and the same thing has happened.  When I loaded up another XP system with the hard drive in it as a primary slave, it took about 20 minutes for XP to load and then the slave was registering in XP.

Thanks for you time...  I hope someone manages to read through all that.


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'I got a great idea for the new Windows!  Lets call it "Windows HT"  for Hostile Takeover!'
"Nah, the public will see right through that...  Lets go with... XP!"
'Why XP?  eXPerience?'
"Hellz no!  Cause it looks like someone sticking their tongue out at you!"Steven Laundrie.....Do you have a win98 boot disk with format and Fdisk on it......If you shut down and set the 1st boot from floppy in the bios.......load the boot disk go to fdisk and remove all partitions .....then using the format ..........format whatever drive you want ....

hope this helps
dl65  Thanks for the response.

I'm currently trying that, started trying it about 25 minutes ago.  I am using a 98 boot disc but it reads the disc and then hangs.  It doesn't even come up with 'Starting Windows 98...' like its supposed to.Steven Laundrie....I thought you were trying to format?
At the A : prompt with the win9x boot disk in ........ type dir and check to be sure there are theFdisk and format files as well as th cd driver files then  enter   FDISK and then look at option 4 ( displays the partitions) ......Remove all partitions and then format the drive or drives

let us know

dl65  Did you activate the remaining 28GB?

(Windows XP)

Right click on My Computer - Disk Management. There you cn manage your disks and activate and form partitions.

I'm sure both of those would work but my computer is being more difficult then normal...

I put in a working Windows 98SE boot disc with valid CD drivers and start up my system.  The BIOS runs its memory scan and checks the 2 HDDs and the 2 CD drives just fine.  It continues on to the boot screen where the boot disc would normally load up but this isn't the case.

Instead, the A: starts to ready the floppy and right where it should start loading the boot procedures, the entire system freezes up.

Alt-Ctrl-Del does work to reset it either, the only way out is to hit the reset or power buttons on the tower.

I can't get to a command prompt to use any of the files on the floppy and when I try to get into Windows, it gives me that blue screen everytime telling me HDD size has changed so I can't get into it either to change anything.Good news!

I got an idea that it might be the other versions of Windows conflicting with XP's boot files so I downloaded a DOS 5.0 Boot disc and it managed to bring up a DOS prompt.  Using Fdisk, I removed all the drives and continued on.

The drive that Windows was getting hung up on was an old partition that I hadn't been able to remove with Fdisk.  Somehow, it ended up being an active partition but was -26% of the total HDD space.  Yep, you read that right, negative percentage.

So, I got XP re-installed and everything is working perfectly, except now that D: is the default for everything but I can live with that.

Thanks for all your suggestions!  Had the situation been slightly different, I'm sure they would have worked.

And remember...  If ever your really stuck...  DOS 5.0.