Hard drive partions

[MT-2500]

I reloaded windows XP pro on a 160 gb hard drive that had windows 98 and Xp pro plus a restore partion. Now I wound up with xp on main drive C plus 2 partions.
Can anyone tell me how or best way to get rid of 98 windows and the extra large partion around 50 gb.
The PC is a HP pavilion A367C
Thanks
MT

[Gohan Ryu]

To remove Win98:

Start by booting the system into Windows XP. Explore the folder that contains Windows 98, searching for all personal files or documents; move them to a safe place. Then just delete the entire folder that contains Windows 98. You may need to confirm that it's okay to delete read-only files, executable files, and so on. Be careful to delete the Win98 folder, not the WinXP folder.

Now select Run from the Start menu and enter MSCONFIG. Click on the tab entitled BOOT.INI, and click on the button that says Check All Boot Paths. Your system will report that the path used to launch Windows 98 is not valid and offer to remove it. Click on Yes. From now on, your system will boot directly to Windows XP.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1645209,00.asp

For partition management you can use Partition Magic - you won't need to wipe out any data to change partition size or delete partitions with this software. Or maybe someone knows a free utility that does the same thing.

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by Gohan Ryu

To remove Win98:

Start by booting the system into Windows XP. Explore the folder that contains Windows 98, searching for all personal files or documents; move them to a safe place. Then just delete the entire folder that contains Windows 98. You may need to confirm that it's okay to delete read-only files, executable files, and so on. Be careful to delete the Win98 folder, not the WinXP folder.

Now select Run from the Start menu and enter MSCONFIG. Click on the tab entitled BOOT.INI, and click on the button that says Check All Boot Paths. Your system will report that the path used to launch Windows 98 is not valid and offer to remove it. Click on Yes. From now on, your system will boot directly to Windows XP.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1645209,00.asp

For partition management you can use Partition Magic - you won't need to wipe out any data to change partition size or delete partitions with this software. Or maybe someone knows a free utility that does the same thing.

Thanks for the info.
I will see what I can do with it.
MT

[jmrev]

If they are set as windows partitions, you could simply start up a windows xp or similar install disk, and it go so forth as if you were going to reformatt your pc, but instead delete the windows 98 OS partition.

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by jmrev

If they are set as windows partitions, you could simply start up a windows xp or similar install disk, and it go so forth as if you were going to reformatt your pc, but instead delete the windows 98 OS partition.

Thanks for posting.
I tryed about everyting but nothing seamed to work on it.
I wound up getting a segate 160 GB external hard drive and saving most of my programs and info.
Then I reformated the hole thing and reloaded XP pro on it in NTFS file system.
The only stange thing is properties for it only shows 127 GB and it is suposed to be a 160 GB hard drive.
MT

[Knifeblade]

XP doesn't gobble that much h/d. Perhaps you have other stored programs that have claimed h/d space.

[Plastic_Fork]

You can expect Windows to use 10% of the hard drive capacity for boot tables and swap file, etc. plus the hard drives are always rated to the nearest gigabyte - your hard drive probably is really only about a 157gb drive or something along those lines. That's normal for hard drive manufacturers to sell them that way. That whould leave you with around 144gb of space. Windows XP uses about another 5gb, give or take. So you've around 10gb worth of space that being used up by something.

Did you use a recovery disc to install Windows XP (one provided by HP?) or did you do a complete system format? It can be difficult to remove that restore partition - I uses to do computer repair on HP's and that restore partition can be a beast sometimes. You may have to get a Win98 boot disk and do a debug to do an extremely low level format to trash that restore partition. If you need to know how, I'll post what to do. After that, the Windows XP CD can partition it and format it. The debug will make the drive like it was brand new - totally blank without a partition on the lowest possible format.

[MT-2500]

I did a complete flormat on it. And loaded a windows XP pro disk from another pc.
It had the HP windows xp with restore in pc. somehow I lost the windows xp and the restore would not restore from pc hard drive.
I also got jyped no disk came with PC all already loaded up.
I hate them deals.
I aslo tryed the XP restore I had saved on to cd's and it would not load.
I finaly got a windows 98 loaded on it but it came up with sereral partitions.
One of the was the restore partion and another one was about a 35 GB.
I think the 35 GB partition is the one hid out on hard drive.
At about the same time I found out both DVD rewrite and reg DVD CD drives were going bad and not reading the cd's right to reload windows.
I put in a good cd drive and reformated the Hard drive and loaded the windows XP Pro on it.
And copyed over and loaded most of my programs.
When I click on properties it shows 64.7 GB used and 63.2 GB free with capacity of 127 GB
Is there a easy way to find the hidden partition or make it show up?
Or can you post the best way to flormat it so i can get it all back.
Thanks MT

[Plastic_Fork]

Originally Posted by MT-2500

I did a complete flormat on it. And loaded a windows XP pro disk from another pc.
It had the HP windows xp with restore in pc. somehow I lost the windows xp and the restore would not restore from pc hard drive.
I also got jyped no disk came with PC all already loaded up.
I hate them deals.
I aslo tryed the XP restore I had saved on to cd's and it would not load.
I finaly got a windows 98 loaded on it but it came up with sereral partitions.
One of the was the restore partion and another one was about a 35 GB.
I think the 35 GB partition is the one hid out on hard drive.
At about the same time I found out both DVD rewrite and reg DVD CD drives were going bad and not reading the cd's right to reload windows.
I put in a good cd drive and reformated the Hard drive and loaded the windows XP Pro on it.
And copyed over and loaded most of my programs.
When I click on properties it shows 64.7 GB used and 63.2 GB free with capacity of 127 GB
Is there a easy way to find the hidden partition or make it show up?
Or can you post the best way to flormat it so i can get it all back.
Thanks MT

Ok, I looked up your HP Pavilion A367C. It comes with the 160gb drive, a P4 2.8ghz CPU, and a chipset well capable of "seeing" the entire drive. HP's are notorious for having that restore partition and equally notorious for making that restore partition hidden (what the customer doesn't know won't hurt them). Now, to clarify from your earlier post, did you reinstall with a full version WinXP CD from Microsoft and not from a WinXP CD furnished by HP? Did you use the "recovery disk" from HP? Or did you use/borrow a full version WinXP CD from someone else that was a legitimate full version from Microsoft? Pretty much anything you got from HP would have something in it to trigger the creation of the restore partition which is a Win95 FAT16 partition (unless they've jumped to a FAT32 Win98 partition recently - been a few years since I was doing computer repair on HP's). If you didn't use a non-HP, full version WinXP CD then you probably need to do so and reinstall.

Two, provided you installed with a Microsoft WinXP CD, have you updated WinXP to at least SP1? That should technically solve your issue with WindowsXP not seeing the entire drive provided you installed using a non-HP provided CD and the restore partition isn't there. The updated software supports "seeing" large drives over the 140gb restriction (I believe that's the size limitation, might be a little larger) of when WinXP first came out. Of course, your PC is very recent and if you installed using an HP provided CD, it may well have SP1 on it already (or SP2) which means you've got the restore partition somewhere hogging your space.

Failing that, you can always reload WinXP from scratch. Since your optical drive works now and I'm assuming you have a full version WinXP CD (not an upgrade or recovery CD), you should be okay. If you end up reformatting and starting over though, do this. First, make a Win98 bootdisk. If you're having trouble, go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download the Windows 98 SE OEM bootdisk utility. It'll make you a Win98 SE bootdisk. I've used it myself and it's safe. Great place.

Now, after you make the bootdisk, look in "C:\WINDOWS\system32" and locate "debug.exe" and make a copy of it to your bootdisk. Leave the bootdisk in the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Allow it to load - with or without CD-ROM support, your choice - and when you get to the A:\ follow these instructions:

-----------------------------
This will do a low, low, low... and I stress the word LOW level format. This will remove/nuke everything on the hard drive. Data and partitions (including a hidden HP recovery partition). The drive will be utterly blank and leave no trace of anything on the drive whatsoever. Make sure the drives are installed so that the drive you want to blank is the master hard drive.

When you see <Enter> that means you press the "Enter" key, not type the word in. The "xxxx" in the following lines just indicate what the PC displays during the debug process. You don't have to type the "xxxx" in.

At the A:\ type the following:

debug <Enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <Enter>
-A CS:100 <Enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <Enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <Enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <Enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <Enter>
*Note: Type "80" for the main (master) hard drive and "81" for the second (slave) hard drive*
xxxx:010C INT 13 <Enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <Enter>
xxxx:0110 <Enter>
-G <Enter>

It will tell you "Program terminated normally" after the last command. Remove the floppy disk, insert the WinXP CD and reboot and install Windows as normal. You'll need to partition and format the drives using the NTFS file system and then install Windows. Hope this helps out (and helps anyone else out that needs it - I've used this a couple times myself as a last resort when I really needed it).

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by Plastic_Fork

Ok, I looked up your HP Pavilion A367C. It comes with the 160gb drive, a P4 2.8ghz CPU, and a chipset well capable of "seeing" the entire drive. HP's are notorious for having that restore partition and equally notorious for making that restore partition hidden (what the customer doesn't know won't hurt them). Now, to clarify from your earlier post, did you reinstall with a full version WinXP CD from Microsoft and not from a WinXP CD furnished by HP? Did you use the "recovery disk" from HP? Or did you use/borrow a full version WinXP CD from someone else that was a legitimate full version from Microsoft? Pretty much anything you got from HP would have something in it to trigger the creation of the restore partition which is a Win95 FAT16 partition (unless they've jumped to a FAT32 Win98 partition recently - been a few years since I was doing computer repair on HP's). If you didn't use a non-HP, full version WinXP CD then you probably need to do so and reinstall.

Two, provided you installed with a Microsoft WinXP CD, have you updated WinXP to at least SP1? That should technically solve your issue with WindowsXP not seeing the entire drive provided you installed using a non-HP provided CD and the restore partition isn't there. The updated software supports "seeing" large drives over the 140gb restriction (I believe that's the size limitation, might be a little larger) of when WinXP first came out. Of course, your PC is very recent and if you installed using an HP provided CD, it may well have SP1 on it already (or SP2) which means you've got the restore partition somewhere hogging your space.

Failing that, you can always reload WinXP from scratch. Since your optical drive works now and I'm assuming you have a full version WinXP CD (not an upgrade or recovery CD), you should be okay. If you end up reformatting and starting over though, do this. First, make a Win98 bootdisk. If you're having trouble, go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download the Windows 98 SE OEM bootdisk utility. It'll make you a Win98 SE bootdisk. I've used it myself and it's safe. Great place.

Now, after you make the bootdisk, look in "C:\WINDOWS\system32" and locate "debug.exe" and make a copy of it to your bootdisk. Leave the bootdisk in the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Allow it to load - with or without CD-ROM support, your choice - and when you get to the A:\ follow these instructions:

-----------------------------
This will do a low, low, low... and I stress the word LOW level format. This will remove/nuke everything on the hard drive. Data and partitions (including a hidden HP recovery partition). The drive will be utterly blank and leave no trace of anything on the drive whatsoever. Make sure the drives are installed so that the drive you want to blank is the master hard drive.

When you see <Enter> that means you press the "Enter" key, not type the word in. The "xxxx" in the following lines just indicate what the PC displays during the debug process. You don't have to type the "xxxx" in.

At the A:\ type the following:

debug <Enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <Enter>
-A CS:100 <Enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <Enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <Enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <Enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <Enter>
*Note: Type "80" for the main (master) hard drive and "81" for the second (slave) hard drive*
xxxx:010C INT 13 <Enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <Enter>
xxxx:0110 <Enter>
-G <Enter>

It will tell you "Program terminated normally" after the last command. Remove the floppy disk, insert the WinXP CD and reboot and install Windows as normal. You'll need to partition and format the drives using the NTFS file system and then install Windows. Hope this helps out (and helps anyone else out that needs it - I've used this a couple times myself as a last resort when I really needed it).

Plastic_Fork
Thanks for all of the info.
When time permits I will give it a try.
The HP PC I have was bought new from HP but did not come with any disk (I got jypped on that end) It only had XP loaded on it with the recovery program all ready installed on PC.
I did get the recovery/restore program copyed on to cd disk for recovery.
I tryed installing it from the recovery disk but my cd drive was not copying right and the installation failed.
All some where along the line I had loaded a winows 98 disk on it to.
Giving me several partions.
I have a windows XP pro up grade disk from my old Dell pc. With a service pack 2 add on disk.
It will load xp pro service pack one as long as you have a windows 98 disk for the upgrade info.
That is the one I got loaded on the HP 1.6 hard drive after I got a good cd drive in it.
Thanks for all of the good info.
Mt

[Oz]

Or you could install something like Partition Magic and do it with 3 clicks of your mouse ?

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by Oz

Or you could install something like Partition Magic and do it with 3 clicks of your mouse ?

Thanks for the info Oz
Where is a good place to find the magic Partition?
MT

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by Plastic_Fork

Ok, I looked up your HP Pavilion A367C. It comes with the 160gb drive, a P4 2.8ghz CPU, and a chipset well capable of "seeing" the entire drive. HP's are notorious for having that restore partition and equally notorious for making that restore partition hidden (what the customer doesn't know won't hurt them). Now, to clarify from your earlier post, did you reinstall with a full version WinXP CD from Microsoft and not from a WinXP CD furnished by HP? Did you use the "recovery disk" from HP? Or did you use/borrow a full version WinXP CD from someone else that was a legitimate full version from Microsoft? Pretty much anything you got from HP would have something in it to trigger the creation of the restore partition which is a Win95 FAT16 partition (unless they've jumped to a FAT32 Win98 partition recently - been a few years since I was doing computer repair on HP's). If you didn't use a non-HP, full version WinXP CD then you probably need to do so and reinstall.

Two, provided you installed with a Microsoft WinXP CD, have you updated WinXP to at least SP1? That should technically solve your issue with WindowsXP not seeing the entire drive provided you installed using a non-HP provided CD and the restore partition isn't there. The updated software supports "seeing" large drives over the 140gb restriction (I believe that's the size limitation, might be a little larger) of when WinXP first came out. Of course, your PC is very recent and if you installed using an HP provided CD, it may well have SP1 on it already (or SP2) which means you've got the restore partition somewhere hogging your space.

Failing that, you can always reload WinXP from scratch. Since your optical drive works now and I'm assuming you have a full version WinXP CD (not an upgrade or recovery CD), you should be okay. If you end up reformatting and starting over though, do this. First, make a Win98 bootdisk. If you're having trouble, go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download the Windows 98 SE OEM bootdisk utility. It'll make you a Win98 SE bootdisk. I've used it myself and it's safe. Great place.

Now, after you make the bootdisk, look in "C:\WINDOWS\system32" and locate "debug.exe" and make a copy of it to your bootdisk. Leave the bootdisk in the floppy drive and reboot the machine. Allow it to load - with or without CD-ROM support, your choice - and when you get to the A:\ follow these instructions:

-----------------------------
This will do a low, low, low... and I stress the word LOW level format. This will remove/nuke everything on the hard drive. Data and partitions (including a hidden HP recovery partition). The drive will be utterly blank and leave no trace of anything on the drive whatsoever. Make sure the drives are installed so that the drive you want to blank is the master hard drive.

When you see <Enter> that means you press the "Enter" key, not type the word in. The "xxxx" in the following lines just indicate what the PC displays during the debug process. You don't have to type the "xxxx" in.

At the A:\ type the following:

debug <Enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <Enter>
-A CS:100 <Enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <Enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <Enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <Enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <Enter>
*Note: Type "80" for the main (master) hard drive and "81" for the second (slave) hard drive*
xxxx:010C INT 13 <Enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <Enter>
xxxx:0110 <Enter>
-G <Enter>

It will tell you "Program terminated normally" after the last command. Remove the floppy disk, insert the WinXP CD and reboot and install Windows as normal. You'll need to partition and format the drives using the NTFS file system and then install Windows. Hope this helps out (and helps anyone else out that needs it - I've used this a couple times myself as a last resort when I really needed it).

Update on it.
I got into Computer management and then into disk management and found 21 GB in a unallocated patition.
I got the unalloted partition deleted and wiped out and got 149 GB back on the hard drive. But also hit the wrong button and deleted the reg partition with my windows set up and other stuff.
Now it is reload time again.
Would it be better to load the windows XP pro disk from my old Dell pc or just load the HP restore setup that came with the HP computer?
The HP computer came with reg window XP.
Thanks MT

[Oz]

Your data might not be lost! Try mounting the partition again as primary, and see if all of your data is still there.

Use the disks that came with the machine, using non-OEM disks on OEM boxes and stuff can cause headaches.

Partition Magic can be found everywhere on the internets darker side. Hunt around....

[MT-2500]

Originally Posted by Oz

Your data might not be lost! Try mounting the partition again as primary, and see if all of your data is still there.

Use the disks that came with the machine, using non-OEM disks on OEM boxes and stuff can cause headaches.

Partition Magic can be found everywhere on the internets darker side. Hunt around....

Ok I will look for it and check for the lost data.
On the disk that came with the machine they did not give me any disk with it.
I got gypped. Everything was all pre loaded on pc.
I did save a copy of the HP system restore/recovery disk. Which is suposed to load back up everything OEM if all goes well.
Thanks MT