How to elim the IBM Diagnostics partition

[KelleyW]

Got a T42, has a Hitachi "40 G" onboard, partitioned as 30G NTFS and the rest as an IBM 'special' partition.

I have since upgraded the onboard HD to 100G. Works great, sees the shock-protection, works great.

Trying to recycle the old drive. I could reformat the NTFS partition, but can't seem to touch the IBM partition. Don't mind reformatting the old drive again, as I'm using it as a portable copy of my music library.

Any suggestions fro recovering these last ~5Gigs?

Thanks

[richk]

I will assume you can create a bootable CD or a bootable floppy and use them. I suggest getting 2 tools: Hitachi Feature Tool and Drive Fitness Test. They are both free downloads at Hitachi site. Use the feature tool first and under features, change the capacity to the original manufacture size. (the max) Then use DFT to erase the drive.

[rssb]

You need to disable that partition in the bios and it would be visible then. From there you can either format or do whatever you want. Check for parities space + phoenix bios in google.

Alternatively you can boot the laptop with a hardware maintenance disk, and use the option to remove the service parition.