Hi all. I have 2 HDD's-C & D drives.I want to completely format my c drive due to a corrupt ME file on it.I'm currently using W2k succesfully from my D drive.When I try to format my C drive I cannot as "the volume is in use by another program" Format may run if this volume is dismounted first y/n?.What does this mean and how can I successfully format my C drive?Would I have to boot up my C drive first or how can this be done if booted in D drive? Many Thanks Peter.

Just get a boot disc and wipe the drive from there using format or fdisk depending on how you want to clean it. Beware however that once you format/fdisk the drive your going to wipe out the bootloader and you won't be able to get to Win2K. I would copy the "boot.ini" file to a floppy before you wipe the drive, then replace it once you've reformatted the C drive.

Under you win 2000 part go to run. Type in mmc. When the mmc opens go to file add snap in. Then another window opens hit add at the botom of that window. Then when yet another opens look for disk management in the list. Select it and press add. The ok. The ok to the other window. Then once you are back in the main window that roginally opened double click the disk management link and youll see a big screen open on the right. At the bottom it will have 2 boxes with your partitions. right click the one you dont want and say delete. Sya yes or ok to any warnings.

Why don't you use FDISK and make your D drive the Primary Boot disk. That way you can boot using Win2000 without any use of your current C drive.

There is a big difference between marking a partition as active and wiping/removing c:. You can mark d: active but if you remove the first primary partiton [c:] your system won't boot. By going into W2K to do a format, you were asking W2K to format its own system partition. I am surprised it would let you. I am wondering if you had answered yes to the question of dismount the volume what the result would be. Your reason to format c: due a corrupt file makes no sense. You can delete everything on c: EXCEPT the root files. You can do this from W2K and then you can defrag the partition. No reason to mess with the booting of the system. Except, if you are planning on reinstalling ME, than you will need to plan on a repair [look up recovery console] of W2K so after the ME install you have the boot menu again and can mount W2K.

Go with Wanderer's advice; using Bud Wise suggestion will require 'a few creative tweaks' to get the current d: drive to boot and run W2K etc. successfully...