re-partitioning

[madads]

Right a friend of mine has a hp with 256ram 40gig hd :( , but for some reason the hd has been partitoned into 4 :confused: , never bothered it before but last week it crashed so i went down to put win'xp home on for him ;) , now i have done this before on mine last year but for some reason his wont let me reformat the hd :confused: ? so i reformated the split drive(h) run ok for a week then to night it crashed again but this time wont accept the win' disc go's through the set up but still wont load propely? any ideas? could the hd be re-partitoned into one drive?(c)?


Cheers for any info ;) ;)

[mjc]

HP model would be helpful...

Also, you need to find out who made the drive that is in it...crashing like that in about a week sounds suspiciously like a potential hard drive problem. When you find out who made the drive, you will need to grab their diagnostics and run them...

[Sylvander]

Use KILLDISK (http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm) to view the drive partition info.

I discovered some years back that Format.com would not reformat a non-DOS partition [one made by some partitioning program other than fdisk].
Which prog is being used to attempt to reformat?
Are the present partitions DOS partitions?
Which program was used to produce the present partition arrangement?
Partition Magic?
Can you afford to repartition anew?
You might make image backups of the [contents of the] existing partitions before doing that so you can restore chosen contents afterwards [whole partition, or chosen files/folders].