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View Full Version : Can I / how can I use Knoppix to format my "Windows" drive.



silverfox56
05-12-2011, 09:29 AM
I have a spare second internal hard drive in my PC that I want to format.

Windows will not let me format the spare disc because it seems to detect the existence of some (unwanted) Windows Vista system files.

How may I use Knoppix to format the spare hard drive e.g. is there a format command similar to "Format G:" ?

Thank you
Newbie

Harry Kuhman
05-12-2011, 09:44 AM
On the chance that someone tells you how to do the format, or you figure it out, let me suggest that it is a very bad idea to write to a NTFS partition under Knoppix or to create a NTFS partition with it. It might seem to work for a while, but there is often subtle corruption that will get you at some later point.

To try to offer a helpful alternative, you very well could expect to successfully remove any existing partition from the drive with a Linux formatting tool (just be very sure to get the proper disk, I might even remove the other drive while I was doing this to be safe). It seems very strange to me that you would have formatting problems because of existing files on the disk, but once you remove the partition Windows should no longer find the files and you should be able to use Windows to make its partitions.