deleting off old drive

[linv5800]

i had vista on a old 60gig maxtor drive and got a new seagate 160gig drive ,

when i reistalled vista on the new drive , everything is great but vista won't

let me delete vista off the old drive . it won't even let me reformat the old drive.

im the admin and only user , any clues on how to get back that space ?

btw , i deleted the second vista fron the boot list.

and id like to thank everybody here for all the great help !

Edited November 23, 2006 by linv5800

[uvmain]

if you had both drives in the machine, then Vista may have put the bootmgr onto your 60 gig. the new drive needs to come before the old one (ie primary master, or sata1), because Vista puts the bootmgr onto the first disk.

If this is so, you'll need to swap the drive's ports, and repair the install. If this is not the case, then have you tried Disk Manager rather than trying through explorer to format?

[Spooky]

Sometimes Vista will not let you reformat a drive partition that has an OS on it from within Vista. This is mostly because Vista wants that old partition gone and wants you to delete an old partion then recreate a new partiton on drives it manages. Don't format hard drives from explorer that have operating systems on them, use disk management as Vista views drives with operating systems on them as management tasks and not just drives to hold information and files.

Try these first;

1. In the Vista drive management, right click on the drive and choose to delete the partition. Then create a new partition - it should let you format the drive now after the new partition is created, however, for some reason with some older drives you may need to reboot back into Vista to continue the format.

2. If #1 doesn't work, try opening up an admin command prompt and using the format command from there.

3. If #2 or #1 doesn't work boot a rescue type CD that will allow you access a command prompt, something like Bart's or winPE or something like that. Then format the drive from there. Or you could use a partition management type software and boot on that.

4. If #1 - #3 fail, then remove the new hard drive, put the old one back in and do step #3. Then when its done, put your new drive back in as your bootable drive (i.e... C:\) and if you want plug the old drive in as a secondary some where, and away ya go.

Play around a little with #1 first.

Edited November 24, 2006 by Spooky

[linv5800]

thanks for all the help but nothing seems to work.

[Spooky]

If the drive is good then something has got to work. let the drive you want to reformat be the only drive in the system, boot on one of the CD's I mentioned above (if you have something like that, if not try a win98 boot disk with format on it) and format the drive. Then shut down, replace the drive with the one you want and format it then install Vista but during the install choose to reformat the drive for NTFS.

thanks for all the help but nothing seems to work.