how do I delete an old MBR from a drive from within windows?

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darw_n

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 7, 2001
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I installed a new system yesterday, and I used all my drives from my old raid setup...

well, drive C: retained it's old master boot record, forcing windows to install to D:/

whats more annoying is that I can not delete the old MBR from C:, which is a 6 gig partition on a 80 drive. I would really like to totally wipe out and open up this drive to it's full 80 gigs as a single volume.

any ideas?
 
Use Partition Magic, or do a reinstall and delete all partitions in text mode setup before continuing.
 
Im not to sure if you can do it in windows. But if you do it old school then you use the Win98 setup floppy. just type FDISK /mbr
 
I've got the same problem on my WD2500JD. My solution? Buy a 300GB 7200.8 Seagate, copy over all the data and zero fill format the WD drive :D

of course you don't have to have a new drive, just backup to DVDs if all else fails
 
Seer said:
Im not to sure if you can do it in windows. But if you do it old school then you use the Win98 setup floppy. just type FDISK /mbr
Click to expand...

That's what I would recommend.
 
Won't help....He has two partitions on the drive. Drive C: is a 6 GB partition at the beginning of the 80GB disk. fdisk /mbr will rewrite the master boot record if it is corrupted, but will not make that partition go away or get the space back.
 
uzor said:
Won't help....He has two partitions on the drive. Drive C: is a 6 GB partition at the beginning of the 80GB disk. fdisk /mbr will rewrite the master boot record if it is corrupted, but will not make that partition go away or get the space back.
Click to expand...

No kidding, but his question was how to format the MBR. Everyone knows how to get rid of partitions, and that wasn't his question. If he uses fdisk to clear the MBR, and then fdisk again to delete both partitions, he'll be fine.
 
sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough, I wont to eliminate the MBR, so then I can repartion the drive to one single volume
 
darw_n said:
sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough, I wont to eliminate the MBR, so then I can repartion the drive to one single volume
Click to expand...

FDISK /MBR will do it then. Your still going to have to delete both partitions and create a new one, or delete one and resize the other with PartitionMagic.
 
Well i personally recommend writing zeroes to the drive, either using the cd/floppys that come with your drive, or getting a program called gwscan. It always seems to work out pretty well...

https://www.lehigh.edu/security/gwscan/gwscan.htm

Of course there's always the organic format option (rubbing a magnet all over it)...

DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE LINE IS A JOKE! I will not be responsible for any attempt at humor or the wrath that it may incur. I really DONT recommend that you rub ferrous earth magnets all over the platters of your hard drive. That would be silly.

If you do try it, please post your results/experiences.....
 
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