Deleting recovery partition

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laz · #1 Post by **laz** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 12:43 pm

A while ago I upgraded my internal hdd to a Travelstar 7K100 80GB and put the old drive in a USB enclosure. Since the old drive is no longer my primary drive, and when I reloaded the system, the recovery disks put the hidden partition on the new drive, I'd like to get rid of it on the USB drive. I tried setting the security for IBM Predesktop Area to disabled in the bios, but nothing can touch it. Windows sees the partition but can't touch it and I get a divide by zero error when I try to boot off a floppy and start fdisk.

Anyone know how I can go about deleting that partition.

reltor · #2 Post by **reltor** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 1:20 pm

You could try a program like Mutilate File Wiper. I have noticed it will tend to remove anything and overwrite it. Even when the recycle bin won't delete it.

I think it has a free trial.

#3 Post by **GomJabbar** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 1:44 pm

I believe here is your answer. I posted this link for someone else today also.

Format HDD with IBM Hidden Partition

laz · #4 Post by **laz** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 4:47 pm

I tried the feature tool, but it doesn't detect the USB drive (bios does detect it however). I couldn't find anything useful in the help for the feature tool about that.

And I really don't want to swap it back into the TP.

Actually, I windows can't seem to touch the recovery partition on my internal drive either, so I don't even know if that would help.

hiyel · #5 Post by **hiyel** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 4:53 pm

Try find a copy of partition magic, it should solve your problem.

#6 Post by **GomJabbar** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 6:44 pm

Partition Magic won't work for this. You need to put the hard drive in the ThinkPad then boot up off of the floppy with Hitachi's Feature Tool and run it. This isn't really such a big deal unless you don't have a ThinkPad and a floppy drive to use with it. Swapping hard drives is very easy in a ThinkPad in my experience.

Read the link I posted above. dg1261 explains the procedure and why Partition Magic won't work.

laz · #7 Post by **laz** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 11:44 am

Would putting it in an ultrabay 2nd hard drive adaptor work? I have access to one...

w0qj · #8 Post by **w0qj** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 12:02 pm

There was an old forum posting a while ago that suggest you format your portable USB HDD with the DISKPART command.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... +partition

Warning: back up your data first before trying this HDD formatting operation.

hiyel · #9 Post by **hiyel** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 8:45 pm

You're right GomJabbar, I used partition magic to delete my hidden partition. But I guess I swithed the HPA setting from "secure" to "normal" in bios, then I used bootable version of PM to delete it.

laz · #10 Post by **laz** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 9:31 pm

I tried partition magic (with the drive in a usb enclosure and a 2nd hdd adaptor) and it give me an error each time.

laz · #11 Post by **laz** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 1:56 am

Swapped the hdd back in, booted off a dos cd and ran fdisk. That seemed to do the trick.

Deleting recovery partition

Deleting recovery partition

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