Hey guys, need some help and have seen a bunch of your forums on this and am impressed... keep up the good work.

I am trying to Format my C: in Safe mode, but am receiving "System Partician is not allowed to be formated". So I went into Computer management, and my C: is split up between these two particians...'C: 37.22GB, Healthy(System Boot Page File Active Crash Dump Primary Partition' and '31MB Healthy (EISA Configuration)'. I assume that my issue is that it is particianed due to the '31MB Health.....' partician. When I right click on it, I get no options except for 'help' and it only pumps me into windows help which is no help at all.

I would send a screen shot but since I am in safe mode and my programs are hosed, I cannot.

Do you have any options for me on this? If not, do I need to 'load from the OS CD' like you mention in other strings? If so, can you advise how I can do that?

Thanks again and I look forward to hearing back from you.

J

Hi jameslaur...

Your C: drive is the system drive and cannot be formatted from within Windows. The smaller partition is the recovery partition and holds the files needed to recover your system should it fail catastrophically.

You can format using an operating system cd or an application such as Boot and Nuke. Do you have an XP or Vista cd?

wannabe1

Ok, thanks for the clarity. I do have the Vista CD. In bay door, ready to go. Can you detail what I need to do?

Hi.

turn on your computer, after put your CD operative system in your CD_rom, turn of your computer and after 5 second turn it again the computer go to ask you if you want to reboot your computer from your CD or normal. or ask you if you want to boot your computer from the CD click any keys do that..what ever the instruction to ask you to start from the CD. after the computer go to ask you some questions, follow the instruction and you can erase the C: partition, but I warning you if you format C: partition you erasing your hardrive, So be sure that is what you want... also I think the computer can ask you if you want to fix the partition without format the partition. follow what you want to do.

good luck

transit

There is also a program called Gparted its found Free on the net. Its a good one for adding or removing and changing the size of partitions. its very easy to use to. i keep a copy of it around. And alot of Linux live CDs have partition editors on them. Who knows you may find you like linux better. :-)