removing a boot partition from a drive in windows

Hi

Some of you will remember my posting about getting a new pc that came with a drive.  There was no OS with the pc.  The drive is empty.  The drive is the quandary of this post.  It is a 1TB drive, already formatted with a 351mb unallocated partition, probably for the boot section.

I don't want to use the drive for windows itself, as I have a drive for that.  I want to use the drive for storing info, video, music etc, but I would have to get rid of the 350 mb section at the start of the drive first and format it as one partition, before repartitioning to suit my needs.

I followed an article by HTG using Diskpart on this, but on finishing I got this this response:

  "Virtual Disk Service Error.  Clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume".

Does anyone know how else to get rid of this partition.  Delete obviously is missing in disk management.  Or is it a case of contacting the suppliers of the pc to find out?

Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered.

hedley

see if this helps you :- http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html

 

Hi terry, thanks for your reply. Sorry to say I got the same response at the end. Still says Virtual Disk Service error, etc, etc.
Shall have to think of something else.

Thanks for the help. Appreciated, as always.
hedley

You need to run diskpart from a booted installation disc/flash drive.Once it's been cleaned, remove it and install your other HDD to install to then once that's done put the 1TB HDD in as a lower SATA or IDE port.

Hi Ztrucker, thanks for the reply.  Ok.  I've read a post on SevenForums on what I think you're talking about, so I'll start and you can correct me if I'm wrong.  I have to create a usb thumb drive of windows 7/diskpart to install on this drive which will have to, for now, replace my present c: drive. 

After I install windows I use diskpart on it initialize, format, etc. and then re-install windows again onto the drive I'm going to use it on, or just reinsert the drive?

 

Also, in his article Brink mentioned that if you have UEFI instead of BIOS motherboard, you will need to use FAT32 and not NTFS.  I have UEFI, but I have it set as CSM enabled, which I'm told is the same as the old BIOS settings.  So, would I still have to change the settings, do you think?  Sorry, not up on these things, I'm afraid.

Thanks again for the help, much appreciated, as always.

hedley   

Disable Secure Boot.

Enable CSM.

Use NTFS, not FAT32.

 

You really don't need to use diskpart. You can simply delete the partitions on the 1TB by booting the Win 7 install DVD and delete the partitions from there then create one new on that spans the entire disk and do a Quick Format (NTFS).

Quit the install.

Power off.

Remove 1TB drive, insert SSD.

Boot install disk.

Delete all partitions, if any, on the SSD then click Next without creating any. The installer will create what it needs then continue the install.