Windows XP cannot format Hard Disk

Manet — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:10:00 +0000

Ey! do not panic when your Windows XP cannot format your hard disk while you are formatting your computer. This article will help you to over come the problem.

At the time you would get the message similar to this

“this partition cannot be deleted because the maximum disk space already used“

How this problem would be occurred?

Well the following line are what I have observed and it happen to me.

You have several HDD partitions, specially one for windows and other for Linux.
When you install Linux you used all the space that left over (unpartitioned) from Windows partition. Basically you utilised all the disk space of your hard disk drive.
Now you need to format you Windows partition
You need to delete/recreate or accidentally delete the windows partition and recreated it again
Now you try to format it, so you can install a fresh Windows OS on it
Then, this is when you get this problem

If you go ahead and delete other partitions just to accommodate this Windows formatting requirement, you will lost the data on those partition.

How to overcome such problem?

At the time it happen to me, I couldn’t possibly see any other way to work around it while I am in the “giant” blue screen. The only way to overcome this is to boot the computer from one of the Linux Live CD (I use Ubuntu) and format the partition that I need.
Linux formating tools doesn’t demand for spare disk space or complain about maximum disk space has been used. More than that, it could format your disk partition to serveral different orders/formats such as Primary, Logical, FAT, NTSF, etc.

Formatting the partition

Insert Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition (obtain a copy of it if you don’t have one)
Restart PC to boot from CD
Press any key to boot your PC with Ubuntu
It will prompt language. Select you preferred language
Select “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer“
When you get to Ubuntu Desktop go to
System > Administration > Partition Editor
Right click on Unknown partition
Select New
Set “New Size (MB)” to maximum as shown in that panel (top left)
Set “Create as” to Primary Partition
Set “File System” to NTFS if you use it for Windows XP or FAT 32 if you use it for Windows 98 or lower
Click Add
Click Apply
Say Yes if any confirmation message appear

When you are done, just reboot your PC and go back to your Windows installation, when you get to the step where the list of all disk partitions, do not delete any of those. Just selected the one you need to install Windows and do a full format in the next step. Note that if you do a quick format you might possibly have problem installing windows on that partition

We have to Thanks to the Live CD :)

Restore GRUB menu after Windows installation

Manet — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:06:00 +0000

[ This post is duplicated to updated version at 2008/06/06/restore-grub-after-installing-windows ]

From my experience, when I format my Windows I lost my Grub boot menu at the same time. Before I have this solution, I usually reinstall everything all over again. Now that I want to keep things running for a long term, even my windows need to be formatted I still have my Linux OS bootable without losing anything. Below is the solution.

If you have similar scenario follow the rest of this post, I will show you trick and tools will be the solution for you

Tool

Linux Live CD

Restore Grub

Reboot your computer with Linux Live CD
After Live session user has started
Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
On command line type

grub
At the grub prompt, type

find /boot/grub/stage2
This will return something like
```
(hd0,2)
```
the number could be different with different PC. user the same number in the next step
To setup the boot partition boot type
```
root (hd0,2)
```
this is the hard drive and the partition your Linux is installed
To configure grub type

setup (hd0)
Done. You can exit with command

quit