I am trying to wipe out and rebuild my daughters compaq/dektop. i have been able to delete all partitions except the primary dos partition. when i go to delete it, it wants me to enter the Volume Label #, yes i can see it and i do know what it is, my problem is that i cannot re create the characters in it, i have looked at the ASCII charts and not all the characters are on this chart. I am missing the solid white diamond, and the club inside of a solid whote box...Is there another chart for these symbols, or better yet a way around the volume label, wipe out the volume label? right now there is no OS on the system, and i am also limited with being able to download delpart or others as they need to be on a floppy and the laptop i currently use does not have a floppy....... any idea's would be helpful

KillDisk is avaiable on CD: http://www.killdisk.com

Yeah, it's probably not a matter of recreating those oddball symbols - they typically indicate disk corruption. Starting over by recreating the partition is a good idea, but it's possible the disk has sustained serious damage - a thorough scan would seem advisable at some point Either burn a bootable CD with the appropriate tools, or gain access to a machine with a floppy diskette drive - - at times, invaluable I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

Careful... Is this a system with a recovery CD as opposed to full version CD? If you do have a recovery CD system... then perhaps this "dos" partition is actually the partition that Compaq/HP (and others...) use as part of the recovery CD process? If it is... then it would not be wise to delete that partition...; as if you do - the I doubt the recovery CD you probably have will work...? Clarify that situation before preoceeding?

... some numbers might help - I've never had the misfortune to deal with one of those, but wouldn't the primary partition be reserved for the actual OS? It may be too late (since other partitions are gone) and for that matter, the drive itself may be hosed I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

I've had zero experience with these systems that depend on a recovery CD etc. But I seem to recall that there are two Primaries on the drive; the first being that "special/recovery info") and the second the actual operating system Primary...; and an Extended may also exist too (along with the two primaries as above).

label c: [enter] [enter] ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2