Windows 7 not letting me format drive that has Vista installed on it

Michael H

Not having much luck around the internets with this one...

My computer has three hard drives, one with Windows 7 installed, one with Vista installed, and one storage drive. For a while I was dual-booting W7 and Vista, but now that I no longer need the Vista installation I'd like to format that drive.

I used EasyBCD to remove the option of booting to Vista. (My computer now boots directly to W7.) There is no longer any data I wish to keep on the Vista drive at all. When I go to Disk Management in Windows 7, however, it will not let me format the drive. It gives the error: "Windows cannot format the system partition on this disk."

What steps do I need to take to format the Vista drive so that I can re-purpose it?

If it matters, in Disk Management it lists the Vista drive as Drive 0, my storage drive as Drive 1, and my W7 drive as D2.

BlochWave

Well lemme think here

I think the problem is that the computer's Master Boot Record (MBR) was written to the Vista drive originally, and that hasn't changed. My guess is right now when the computer boots the very first thing it knows to look at is the MBR on the boot drive, which in your case loads the EasyBCD, I guess from the Vista drive? I would bet if you go into the BIOS on startup and set the boot drive to be the Windows 7 drive directly, it wouldn't work because that boot sector has been changed by EasyBCD.

That should be fixable or I may be misunderstanding the problem, but I bet it's something related to those...words. More research coming.


EDIT: Well that was easy research. First, try going to to the BIOS when you boot and setting the actual boot drive to the Windows 7 drive. If it fails like I think it might (either you'll get a boot error or a blank screen with a blinking text cursor, my favorite failure because it's so...profound?) follow these directions http://www.ehow.com/how_4836283_repair-mbr-windows.html and make sure you boot from the W7 drive after you repair the MBR.

If it successfully boots from the W7 drive the first time (without needing to repair the MBR), I guess try formatting again then? I think the problem is that your computer won't let you overwrite the MBR it booted from. I may be wrong though, I just vaguely remember having this problem when I was playing with Linux OSes

embrik

BlochWave is correct, the boot record is on the Vista disk. If you were to format it, you'd lose the ability to boot your Windows 7 drive. As suggested, you can disable that drive in the BIOS (or just disconnect it physically) to confirm this. You can try the fix MBR thing, but I'm not sure if that'll work if the Win 7 drive never had a MBR in the first place.

Some quick searching turned up some ideas - here, here and here.

Michael H

Excellent. I haven't forgotten about this, but I also haven't had time to sit down and futz with my desktop the last couple of days. Hopefully I'll be able to get this sorted out tonight.

Michael H

Here's a goofy thing, I decided to use "Re-create/Repair MBR" in EasyBCD. Then I shut down the computer, unplugged the Vista drive, and booted up again. With the Vista drive completely disconnected I booted up to W7 just fine and am typing to you now. I plugged the SATA cable back in, scanned for hardware changes, and now I see the Vista drive but it's not labeled as "System" any more. Guess I'll try a format and see what happens! It appears I can boot just fine without it so we'll see.

Michael H

...and I guess that's all it took. Once if repaired the MBR I found the following:

- If I started the computer with the Vista drive plugged in, it would still call it a system disk and not let me format. This is in spite of the fact that it was completely removed from the boot process as verified by starting it several times without the drive plugged in and getting to W7.

- If I started the computer with the drive unplugged and then plugged it in and re-scanned my hardware, it recognized it as a normal drive.

I formatted successfully and now have my backup drive. Thanks for all the help!