Need to partition drive

[metalist333]

At boot up my system shows a primary drive and a primary drive slave. I keep on getting error messages saying windows cannot write to drive D ( my primary slave drive). Both hard drives are working properly. When I fdisk drive d did not exist.Both C and D have not notice.Can I delete the partition and create a primary dos partition and then
an extended dos partition without formating drives?

[PerryBoy]

I'm not sure if fdisk will work on multiple drives. Do you have files on your second HD that you want to save? If not then you can delete the partition, create a primary and extended partition, then format both ( Since fdisk wont work on your second HD, you'll need a partitioning software like Ranish' Partition Manager, it's free ). If you do have files and you cant read it through windows, you may use a drive imaging software and make an image of your second HD, put it on C, then repartition/format second HD, put the image back. Hope that helps.

[Ed_S]

Is the slave a new drive, just added? Windows can't use an unformatted drive!

You most certainly can use fdisk for any drive, not just the primary master.
Fdisk's option menu, option 5 is "Change current fixed disk drive". Use that to choose the drive fdisk works on.

[deep_sky]

try going to www.winfiles.com (http://www.winfiles.com) for a free partition manager, although i downloaded the trial version of partitionmagic and did not see the big deal about it.

however, i found that windows gets confused easily with multiple drives, so when i got my second drive, i disconnected my first one, got out the boot disk, and fdisked the new one the way i wanted it partition wise...word of advice, unless you are planning to boot off of second drive, just make an extended secondary partition...i found that windows setup does not like skipping from disk to disk when performing scandisk, and primary partitions on two drives causes the drive lettering to be so that windows skips from disk to disk when performing a complete scandisk on all logical partitions. so, after fdisking the second drive (always remembering jumper settings on drives), shut down and then reconnect the first drive as primary master, and the second drive as primary slave...and then everything should work then.....

[This message has been edited by deep_sky (edited 02-08-2000).]