And the upgrades just keep on coming....

[poltr1]

While running some tests on the newly invigorated laptop, I remembered that there's a function which allows me to save the memory to the hard drive. The problem is, I needed to create a special partition on the hard drive in order for this to work. No problem. With a little bit of playing around with Partition Magic, I was able to make enough room for this partition. Then, after looking at the documentation I had previously downloaded, I found the utility I needed to create the partition. (It's called MKS2D.) The laptop is still working fine.

Now the bad news. The laptop's old hard drive still has such a partition. And the Management Console won't let me get rid of it. I even tried DISKPART (a little-known XP utility), but it's flagged as a system partition and won't delete it. Partition Magic reports the entire disk as bad. (Yes, it doesw work on XP, so long as I call up the NT flavor and not the 9x flavor.) If I'm to turn around and sell this drive on EBay, I'll need to get rid of this partition so the entire drive is usable.

I may have to do what bikergeek suggests and create (or obtain) a Linux boot disk. (Just as well; I don't know what happened to my copies of Mandrake and Ubuntu.) I'd rather not have to swap hard drives in the laptop again just to do this task.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Why not just get a 2.5" enclosure for the second drive? That way you won't have to keep swapping them; you can work on the old drive while booted onto the new one, and even (if you wanted) keep it as portable or backup storage. Newegg has them as cheaply as $6.99.

[poltr1]

Because it won't fit, and it's not worth the trouble or expense.

The old hard drive is thicker than 9.5 mm and only holds 3 Gb.

[zorya-thinks.livejournal.com]

Love the icon!

[poltr1]

Thanks. That's Steve Porcaro of Toto, working on Damius, a huge Polyfusion modular synthesizer.

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

There's no need to get a huge linux distribution to just nuke a hard drive. It looks like hal91, from http://chris.silmor.de/hal91/ would do what you need. It's one floppy disk that you download, and includes an fdisk that should let you delete all partitions on your disk.

[poltr1]

I tried it. It didn't work.