Friday, April 8, 2011

Deleting a locked partition table with Windows XP

Partition tables are lockable, for instance GUID Partition Tables (GPT) will do this, and even though you can see that the disk is attached and activated you may not be able to format it or see its contents. When using Windows XP, if you no longer need the data, the easiest way to get around this is to use the default installed tool DiskPart.exe to remove the disk's Master Boot Record(MBR).

From the XP desktop:
go to Start> Run...> cmd

C:\>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565 Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 37 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 3 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 4 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 5 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 6 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 7 Online 34 GB 0 B
Disk 8 Online 34 GB 0 B

DISKPART> select disk 8


Disk 8 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> exit

The disk is now ready to format.

1 comment:

  1. first person to actually tell me what I wanted!
    thanks a million!!!!

    ReplyDelete