Removing Service Partition

[Ken Fox]

This question pertains to the 80gb 5400rpm SATA hard disk that shipped with my Z61T. I have replaced this disk with a new 7K100 100gb disk, which has had the service partition and Windows partitions transplanted with Norton Ghost 2003, and which works perfectly.

I bought one of those Ultrabay Hard Drive thingies to use the original hard drive as a second hard drive in the system, and I might use it occasionally in the docking station of my X60 as well. Before I put the old 80gb drive into the ultrabay, I tried to delete the two partitions using one of those external SATA to USB2 adapters (generally it is not a good idea to boot up a system with two system disks in it for obvious reasons).

Anyway, the windows partition was easily deleted but the Service partition cannot easily be deleted, including in disk manager service under Win XP.

I can think of several ways I might be able to delete this partition (in order to use the entire hard disk capacity rather than just what is left with the service partition in place) but it appears that IBM/Lenovo has configured it in a way that it cannot be deleted from within Win XP. Has anyone done this easily in order to reuse a disk like this?

Worst comes to worst I think I could just use an old Norton ghost image of a disk that doesn't have a service partition (like from one of my desktops) and overwrite the whole disk, then delete the remaining single partition, or possibly one of those disk manager diskettes or cds that ship with hard disks; I have a few of those lying around and they tend to have some utilities on them.

Rather than bothering with any of that, is there a simpler way to do this from within windows?

Thanx

[losmeme]

You'll have to mount that disk back inside the lappy, toggle the BIOs switch, and then delete the partition.

Re-toggle the BIOs switch, and then re-install the new hard drive.

[Ken Fox]

You'll have to mount that disk back inside the lappy, toggle the BIOs switch, and then delete the partition.

Re-toggle the BIOs switch, and then re-install the new hard drive.

I doubt that would would be the easiest solution. The reason I say that is that my first attempt at deleting the partition was by attaching the hard drive to an external SATA to IDE adapter and plugging it into a USB2 port on my desktop. I then went into control panel/administrative tools/disk manager service (ON THE DESKTOP) and was unable to delete the service partition on the notebook drive.

What this tells me is that IBM/Lenovo has installed this partition in a way that it is inaccessible from windows or at least inaccessible with easily done maneuvers such as what I have tried. I believe this is by design.

If the partition cannot be deleted by a desktop computer (having no service partition and a bios that knows nothing about service partitions) accessing it as a USB2 mass storage device, then this is a Windows XP and not a Bios issue (even if reinserting the drive in the laptop and doing as you say would work, which it might).

Norton Ghost 2003 is clearly capable of creating the same sort of partition with the same "permissions." While I was in disk manager service I looked at the 100gb 7K100 disk that has replaced the old 80gb 5400rpm disk I'm writing about. This new 7k100 disk, written to by ghost 2003, also has an inaccessible service partition.

I have overwritten thinkpad HDDs a number of times in the past with Norton Ghost, so I believe the service partition is fully accessible from DOS. Probably the most simple solution is what I suggested earlier, to overwrite the disk with a disk image having no service partition, and then to take that disk and delete the one big resulting partition. I'd consider this approach preferable because every time you open up a laptop, remove hard disks, and the like is an opportunity to break something. The risk is low, but it is there. The worst possibility from doing this on the disk externally is that the disk itself would be damaged, but it won't damage the notebook which is what would concern me the most.

[carbon_unit]

That is the proper way to do it. If the drive is installed internally you can unhide the partition in the BIOS. Attached externally it may not work properly.

You can use the Hitachi Feature tool to remove partitions and correct the drive size (remove hidden partition).
You can get the Ultimate boot cd http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ it has this and other disk wiping tools on it.

[univibe]

I use Norton Partition Magic on my T60 to delete the service partition.

[Ken Fox]

I was hoping there was some simple way, I'd overlooked, within Windoze to do this and it seems as though there isn't. I guess this stands to reason as one of the purposes of the hidden/aka service partition is that it can be used to salvage a system after such things as file corruptions and virus attacks. In order to do this, apparently it must be hidden from Windows.

I'm sure that all the suggestions you have kindly given would work, however in order to figure out how to use them I would have invested more time than my own simple solution with Norton Ghost would take.

I have a small form factor desktop that was cobbled together from spare desktop parts and has a fairly small active partition, about 5mb., which includes the XP installation. Having ghosted it recently I took that ghost file and "restored" the 80gb original thinkpad disk with it, overwriting everything on it including the service partition. This took about 5 minutes including the boot up time with Norton Ghost. I then removed the drive from the ultrabay holder (replacing it with the optical drive that shipped with the Z61T), then rebooted the system. Then, I hooked the drive up to the system with a SATA->IDE external adapter, and did a quick format. Voila, the 80gb drive has its 76gbs back (allowing for the different ways that makers and operating systems count bytes). The service partition is gone.

For good measure I put the drive back in the ultrabay, swapped it back into the machine, rebooted it, and am repeating the format with 512 clusters. Problem solved, and service partition, gone.

I don't think there is anything special about the service partition that requires a Thinkpad to deal with, but it does require another operating system than Windows XP such as DOS or perhaps Linux, by design.

[SGD]

A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility:

Diskpart permits certain partition deletion operations that are blocked by the snap-in. For example, you can use Diskpart to delete MBR OEM partitions. However, these partitions often contain files that are important to the platform operation. Diskpart blocks the deletion of the current system, boot, or paging volumes and partitions.

But DiskPart is not for weak hearted