how do you delete a drive letter.....

[Willing and Unsure]

So I've got a lot of this all worked out by now with my computer. I keep looking under my computer and there's an extra drive letter that's not doing anything, has no space in it or anything (included a picture and everything). How do I get rid of it since I cant delete it?

 

[ReadyOne]

I forget what OS you're running, but if it's Win9x then it may be the "recovery" drive where the system builder what used to be the "restore CDs".

If you're XP or 2K then right click My Computer and select Manage, then Logical Disk Manager and look see where the partiitions are on the hard disks.

You can also run FDISK from the DOS windows (can't change anything) and see what it says the disk layout is.

PS: Try doing right click Properties for your next screen shot...

 

[Willing and Unsure]

sorry.... this one will be in 98. I did the fdisk thing already to delete the D & E and then combine them to make it 1 partition between the two of them and that's where I'm installing win2k (which is now the E for some strange reason).

I've had some slight issues with the win2k disk that I have and cant get it to go past setup (it keeps asking me for a service pack 2 disk that I dont have). But at least I know where all my hard drive space is right now, I have a new one installed, and the rest will come together sometime tomorrow working nicely.


Also need to mention that this thing hasnt had a recovery drive on here for a very very very long time. it's not the original system that was installed on here. that has long since been deleted and this all has been reconfigured to be what I want instead of what some stupid computer company wanted.

 

[ReadyOne]

Get thee over to the university computer store and get thier 2K disk. Should cost $ that can be counted on the fingers of 2 hands (I think IUPUI was $4? $8?). If should have SP3 integrated on it.

Look also for Partition Magic, Version 6 or later. (V6 knows about 2K version of NTFS.)

 

[Willing and Unsure]

I cant buy it. They dont sell it here anymore. I used to have one and I have no freaking clue what happened to it, but it's gone missing along with all of my other OS disks (I had like 4 different legit OS's with keys and everything).

And so you're aware, I'm not running win2k off of NTFS.... it is a fat32 format.

 

[The_old_man]

Some setups use a virtual disk in memory for temp storage.

 

[Weird Harold]

So I've got a lot of this all worked out by now with my computer. I keep looking under my computer and there's an extra drive letter that's not doing anything, has no space in it or anything (included a picture and everything). How do I get rid of it since I cant delete it?

That might also be a host drive for a "compressed drive" -- i.e. a drive compressed with the Drivespace utility.

If it is the host for a compressed drive, then you really need to reformat that drive to get rid of the compression.

Compare the physical drive sizes in your Setup with the total of all the logical drives on each physical drive. -- if any of the logical drives are bigger than the physical drive -- like a 1GB logical drive on a 600MB physical drive -- then your extra drive is the "host" for a compressed drive.

 

[ReadyOne]

Good Thinking Harold!

It's been quite a while since I met a Stacker type compressed drive. Tried to set one up just for fun a while back, and I couldn't get Windoze tot support it anymore, I know 95 did, but I don't remember if I was playing with 98 or ME...

 

[Willing and Unsure]

okay. I'm really confused now. Please remember I'm no computer expert, I just know some basic stuff and really dont understand the whole computer lingo.


This is what the history of the D: drive has been. If it helps any.

bought the stupid thing in July of 2000. It had a D: partition setup for some important kind of files.

Around April 2001, reformatted the whole thing (fdisk and all) and had win2k installed.

August 2001, reformatted again and had win98 and win2k installed on two separate partitions forming the C: drive (win98) and the D: drive (win2k) and the E: drive (storage).

Sizes of everything in 8/01
C: 3.9 GB
D: 3.5GB
E: 22.5 GB


and here we are now. May 2004, reformatted part of it again and installed a new harddrive. new hard drive is F: (thor) for storage. And the D: and E: were deleted through fdisk and made into one partition as an extended drive which fro some reason is now named E:.

The sizes on all of these things

C: is 3.9GB
D: is 0 (that's what the properties thing says)
E: is 24GB
F: is 74.5 GB

Dont know if any of this makes a difference or not. But from what I understood of Weird Harold's post, the size of each drive/partition matters. But it didnt in the past.

 

[Weird Harold]

August 2001, reformatted again and had win98 and win2k installed on two separate partitions forming the C: drive (win98) and the D: drive (win2k) and the E: drive (storage).
...
and here we are now. May 2004, reformatted part of it again and installed a new harddrive. new hard drive is F: (thor) for storage. And the D: and E: were deleted through fdisk and made into one partition as an extended drive which for some reason is now named E:.

Ok, the problem is in the way Fdisk set up the partitions, probably becaue the old D: partition was an "active" or bootable partition for Win 2K.

You'll need to repartition Drive0 from scratch to get rid of the problem, starting with FDISK /MBR to kill the master boot record so you can get rid of the bootble D: partition.

The /MBR paramter for fdisk is poorly documented, but what it does is enable FDISK to change the boot record on a disk as well as the allocation of the disk into logical drives.

Dont know if any of this makes a difference or not. But from what I understood of Weird Harold's post, the size of each drive/partition matters. But it didnt in the past.

From the partition sizes you gave, for C, D, and E, your Drive0 is a 31 GB drive.

Win 98 includes a utility called DriveSpace -- (based on a program called Stacker from the days when 40 MB was a huge drive) -- that can "double" your effective drive size. In actual use, it provides about 60% more drive space and about a 100% chance that your dirve will eventully crash from excessive fragmentation. I expect that later versions of Windows also have DriveSpace included as a "legacy" utility to support older systems with compressed drives that upgrade.

From the numbers you gave, DriveSpace is NOT in use on your system.