History: the m/c was running on W 2000-Profesnl.. bcos of a lot of virus attack it crashed & decided to be formatted. Owner did not have the OS so had to install 98 with the 98 boot disk Problem in Brief: After booting from 98 boot disk, FDISK was run. The primary partition c: formatted (FAT32) and OS installed. however the d: (NTFS) could not be formatted and now is inaccessible. Question: how do i format this d: to FAT32?

Hi: You should be able to remove the ntfs partition with the freeware delpart.exe: http://www.michalferber.com/downloads.asp Good luck.

Anybody correct me on this if I'm mistaken... Start the computer with the boot disk inserted into the floppy drive. Run FDISK and choose "delete partition", select the partition of d drive and confirm deletion. Exit FDISK and restart computer. Type d: d:>format d: (you might get some message like not ready "abort, retry, fail" -->type f) Then confirm you want to proceed with format. Did you try this? Hope this will help

Thanx for the prompt response. Greg: using delpart.exe will destroy my data on d:. am i right? if i wish to take a back up what do i do? Ian: The FDISK utility could not delte the partition as it is on NTFS (i think) .. it returned error

Delpart and Fdisk will both destroy data on a disk when you delete a partition. Download delpart and copy it to any 9x boot disk, at the prompt run the program. At the prompt=A:\delpart.exe

Hi Manas: Yes delpart will destroy pretty much everything. If you want to save the data I recommend you slave the drive on another PC and copy the data you want to keep. Maybe Ghost or Easy recovery can do it otherwise. There is freeware on the net unless the drive has gone south. Grenier's ntfs driver is what i suggest on the cheap.; Else, you need ntfs for dos. Some dollars involved. Best bet is to slave your drive on a Win 2000 and copy data. Then delpart will get rid of the partition and you can start from scratch. HTH Greg

Fdisk (M$ DOS/'9x(ME) versions) will not remove ntfs partitions/logical-drives if not in a Primary partition; i.e. Extended partition ntfs cannot be removed via Fdisk. Delpart will do it; likewise NT/W2K setup will allow it. If you have an ntfs Extended area, you could: back up data elsewhere and then run delpart; then re-establish partition/'drive' and reformat to fat32? To use delpart - boot up with a suitable bootdisk; change to delpart floppy at the a:\> prompt and run the util; follow on-screen prompts. (You can also add the util to the boot-floppy and thus avoid a disk change.) '9x(ME) cannot see ntfs; but a util (ntfsdos) at: http://www.sysinternals.com does allow '9x(ME) to see/access ntfs; likewise there is a util that allows NT4 to see/access fat32. Freebie version is read-only; money version is read/write. Note: delpart will remove most partitions etc. - permanently (no going back); so use carefully. It was part of NT3.1 Resource Kit; omitted from subsequent RK's... Another source for delpart: http://hercules.lss.ksu.edu/download/MSSTUFF/index.htm