[mysacrement]

HP Pavillion dv6700 Notebook
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
4Gb Ram, 250Gb hdd
No OS Currently Installed
HDD is formatted and wiped.
No partitions, NTFS

I am posting a new thread on this matter to come from a different perspective to give a better explanation of my issue...

There is no OS installed on the HDD. The drive has been formatted using Gparted partition manager, and also it has been wiped using Active@ Kill Disk.

The Operating System will not install.

Upon booting to CMD from CD and looking at the drive, this is what I see...

X:\Sources>

"dir" brings up 128 Files and 9 Dirs

If I go to X:\ and dir, i see this

X:\>dir
Volume in drive X is Boot.

Directory of X:\
109,160 setup.exe
<DIR> Program FIles
<DIR> sources
<DIR> Users
<DIR> Windows
1 Files 109,160 byes
4 Dirs 32,858,112 bytes free



This makes absolutely no sense to me.


I have nothing installed on the drive, it has been freshly formated as I stated above.

Drive C: has no volume label but it seems to be the main drive. There is no other partitions or drives on the PC other than the CD drive.

CD ROM Drive is D:\

So What is this X:\?

What are these files in this X dir that won't format or delete?

If anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of this 72.83Mb dir called X:\ please let me know as I am at a complete loss and don't know what to do.

Thanks guys

[carnageX]

You only need 1 thread for your topic... No need to make more than 1 on the same issue.

[mysacrement]

This is a different issue, the first issue was about not being able to install Vista. this is about not being able to clear the hard drive. Different issues. Thanks though.

[Mak213]

Does GParted allow you to delete this partition or touch it at all?

[mysacrement]

Originally Posted by Mak213

Does GParted allow you to delete this partition or touch it at all?

GParted allows me to format the hdd, (232.88GB), and either partition the drive or leave it whole. it allows me to rename the volume and create an NTFS filesystem. There is currently one single partition of the entire drive. However, whether it is formatting and creating seperate partitions or formatting and creating one single partition (I have tried both) there is "used" space of about 68.10 mb. This happens on all partitions. It seems no matter what there is that 70mb space being used. And if I check CMD, there is still that X:dir containing those what seem to be windows files including boot, program files, etc....

[Mak213]

So when using GParted it allows you to delete all partitions then create 1 partition for the whole hard drive. But during the setup of Vista is when you get this 68MB partition?

[KurrentEweser]

Originally Posted by mysacrement

There is no OS installed on the HDD. The drive has been formatted using Gparted partition manager, and also it has been wiped using Active@ Kill Disk.

I would wipe the disk first before creating any partitions. Let Vista do the partition creation during installation.

[mysacrement]

I'll try that.

Originally Posted by Mak213

So when using GParted it allows you to delete all partitions then create 1 partition for the whole hard drive. But during the setup of Vista is when you get this 68MB partition?

Well, kind of. in Gparted I can format the entire drive. but even after i do so it still shows 68mb of space being used. And its not a partition it simply says "used space" 70mb etc..

Is there a way to make a usb flash drive bootable so i can get into command from it and look at the hdd from there?

Okay well I did my research, and discovered that the X:\sources dir is something that you see when you boot from the windows vista DVD, and enter the cmd prompt. Apparently it's not on the hdd at all... but

How to use the Command Prompt in the Vista Windows Recovery Environment

This is the link that I discovered this. they show the exact screen shot of the x:\source that I see in cmd.

My question is still, what is the 70something MB still on the drive? Is it part of the initial boot from the Vista dvd?

So my hdd is completely formatted and clean and unallocated. No partitions exist.