[eyerj97]

Hello,

I am helping my mother and father in law with their old Dell Dimension Desktop from the early 2000's which was shutting off frequently after it had obtained many viruses. I decided to reinstall XP and to reformat the hard drive and start fresh. The complication I am facing is the computer has two hard drives. The O/S was originally on the smallest one, only 4.7GB. Before the format while using the computer it was getting system tray bubble notices in the lower right of desktop reading "windows virtual memory is too low" and "your drive is running out of space" etc. There is a second hard drive which has 19GB of space that had very little space taken up. When I re installed XP I decided to put it on the larger drive considering all the program files etc. that go on that drive and would rather have it on the larger drive. The installation went fine, but my question is this: Now I have XP on both drives. I tried to format the second, smaller hard drive by right clicking my computer and clicking manage, then clicking disc management under storage, and trying to format drive from there but it's not working. I also just tried right clicking the second hard drive and clicking fomat, but it say's unsuccessfull. I tried the full format and the quick format. Since this is not working, can I put the windows XP disc back in and try to format the second hard drive from the install disc? Can I do this without installing Windows unecessarily on a second drive? All I want to do is have the O/S on the 19GB hard drive, and have a blank secondary 4.8GB hard drive. Right now what I have is XP on both drives, and the viruses that I am trying to fix may very well still be on the secondary hard drive.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason (new forum member)