win xp wont allow dynamic disk format

[warby21]

i have 2 hd's. I cant format the d drive even from the cmd box as it states this drive is in use, yet it is empty of general files. I have noticed that when i turn the pc on it has 2 options of xp professional to boot up from, of which one of them can not as its missing a hal.dll file. I have a feeling that the d drive is powering xp and this is confusing me. Can anybody shed some light on this?

specs
winxp prof 2002
2 x 8gb h/d

cheers

[beeboy]

Can you give us more details? Is C drive a basic disk and is D the dynamic disk? Do you have 2 installations of XP pro, one of which will not boot?

[warby21]

hi, yes the c is basic. Im not sure if i have 2 xp 's only that beofre windows boots up it shows 2 verions of the same to boot from, one of which is missing a system32/hal.dll file

I dont know why it has 2, i never copied two, but the dynamic drive (d) has a small partition which has the system files on it - this seemed to occur when i origially converted the disk to dynamic.

since this email i have tried to boot from floppy and format d, but i must be doing somthing wrong as it is not working. its al a bit of a mess eh!

tks
rob

[beeboy]

If D drive is active then of course you would not be able to format. I am pretty sure that fdisk will not format a dynamic disk. You could look in your hard drive manufacturer's website to see if their tools will format a dynamic disk. There are some free and shareware tools available that say they will deal with dynamic disks but I would go with the manufacturer's tools first. Sorry, not much help.