Overlapping partition

[Jeffrey Holmes]

I recently installed a Maxtor 60 gig drive and used the EZ-Drive installation disk to install the drive. It seemed as if nothing was being accomplished with the installation disk at the time so I stopped and installed with FDISK in the normal manner. All proceeded normally until I tried to load a program called GO-Back and it notified me that I had an overlapping partition and could not be installed until the problem was corrected. I used Partition Magic to view my hard disk partition set up and discovered that I had two identical partitions on my "C-drive"...one of them being an EZ-Drive partition. It is classified as a "non DOS" partition, Pri...no boot records nor does it have a drive letter assigned to it. The other partition is listed as the "C-Drive", Pri, bootable. I believe all the data and programs I installed at the time of installing the hard drive are located on this "C-Drive" partition. I think the "EZ-Drive" partition is completely empty. Partition Magic will only let me see the EZ-Drive partition in the Disk Mapping Option of the program....when i try to run the regular Partition Magic program to try and remove it...it notifies me of the overlapping partion problem and aborts loading itself until the problem is corrected. I believe I can delete the EZ-Drive partition using FDISK (I can see it using FDISK)...so my question at this point is: Can I safely remove the EZ-Drive partition without affecting the "C-Drive" partition and all is programs and boot records?? At this point I don't have the guts to try it without hearing other thoughts or theories on this! Let me thank anyone in advance that offers advice or suggestions on this matter...and thank you for your time!

[Psycho Logical]

Without knowing your comfort level with "walking on eggshells", I can only say that if it were my system I would start all over with FDISK, rather than take the chance that this problem would act up and bite me you-know-where by scrambling everything some time in the future.

[BipolarBill]

I would use Maxblast II to remove the drive overlay and start over. Don't use EZ Setup - it's a real bone-headed "application".

By the way - Welcome to SysOpt!

[SPEEDO]

I have always used the EZ Drive disk to remove the partition it created.

I never had much luck trying to fdisk it out of there...

But now I just wipe by writing zero's to the drive, It takes a while but the results are worth it..

SPEEDO

[smily_03]

'writing a disk pack' (writing zeroes to the drive) has always worked wonders for me before. you can use maxtor's powermax software (availabe here ). this also works well for a messy ntfs situation or when you need to wipe linux completely off of your system and don't want to worry about leaving anything behind. generally, this process takes about an hour for my five-year-old 8.4gb 5400rpm diamondmax drive. instructions on how to use the software are at the bottom of the webpage.

[BipolarBill]

Zap is easier and quicker than anything I know of:

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/zap.exe

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/zap.txt