Strange problem - Please help? :-)

Hi There,

I'm new to this forum and would like to firstly say hello to everyone

Ok, here's the deal: I have a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo 5055 (which is kinda irrelavent) however; it came installed with Windows Vista. My friend is wanting to have Windows XP on there. So, I did as you'd normally do; set the bios to run the boot device as the CD Drive and inserted the Windows XP installation disk in. This ran fine up until the point of detecting which partition it wanted to install XP onto. The list on this part is completely blank and shows no drives to install, format or partition.

Now, I've done as a friend advised and I've been into the Disk Management in the Administration Tools and it claims to have 3 Drives.

- The first is a 2GB partition which (i presume) contains all of the 'Recovery' Data.
- The second is the actual 'System Drive C'.
- Finally the third is the DVD-Rom.

When I right click on the drive for the "System Drive C" its fine, I get all the options to create partitions etc. However, when I goto the 'Recovery Drive' its not giving any options and is basically running as an 'invisible drive' although its not actually saying 'invisible'.

My objective is to basically let the Windows XP installation disc show the System drive to be able to format it (one partition will be fine) and install XP. As it stands the installation process can't find any drive?

Please Please Please can anyone help with this one as all my friends are lost as to how to approach the problem.

Kind Regards and my first post!

Adam (Netties001)

 

Oh, by the way - I have another SATA drive sat waiting to go into the laptop however, I really don't want to physically change the drive over if I don't have to for this will null the warranty and guarantee once its been taken apart.

Many thanks in Advance

 

Welcome to the forum!

I would put the HD in an external USB enclosure and try clearing partitions using a different Windows machine.

Also, I wonder if LiveCD with Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
(Linux that runs itself off CD) would let you format the "recovery partition". Anyone?

 

Thanks, can you get caddy's for the small Laptop HD's?

 

Wait, your using a SATA drive?

 

I would personally recommend people against getting rid of the recovery partition on their notebooks. Certain manufacturers will still require the recovery partition if you need to restore the computer to factory settings even if you have already created a rescue disk.
Getting rid of your recovery partition can mean that you will never be able to restore your laptop back to factory settings. This might sound like nothing major at the moment, but you might run into problems if, for example, a normal Windows installation lacked the appropriate display drivers, or if you ever wished to sell the laptop.

 

Sure,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&N=2010090092+1053807124+1054107131&name=SATA

 

Thanks for your help guys. We've plugged the SATA laptop drive into a donar desktop and installed windows through that. The problem is we're now getting the Blue Screen of death because its running all the drivers for the actual desktop.

We've taken a ghost image of the drive as to have an 'original state' installation of the drive before we started faffing around.

The only problem we have now is trying to get the SATA drivers for the actual laptop as the blinking things aren't on the official Fujitsu-Seimens website (Everything else is including Bios Flashing too) - But I don't wanna faff around with those. - Grrrrr - Laptops - Who would have thought they could be such a pain in the backside