[markj85]

Hello,
I have a Toshiba laptop running Windows XP pro, with 3 partitions. Recently I partitioned my hardrive for installing linux. After using linux for sometime, I deleted the partition using partition magic and redistributed the free space amongst the other partitions. When I was using linux, I installed a program called F-Disk, which allowed me to access my linux partitions from windows. This program made the linux partitions as separate partitions which would show up on My Computer. But now after deleting linux, these local disks still show up on my computer with a red circle and a white question mark on them. They dont have any space on them and I cant access them or anything like that. These local drives do not go away at all. I have a attached an image which shows My computer.

Can someone help me with this please?
Thanks.

[Skydawg]

Try going into disk management and see if those drives still exist there, if they do delete them, I have a feeling they still exist to the operating system, but it can't locate them, hence the "?", and once you delete them from disk management, they will go away.

Right click "My Computer", click on "Manage", under "Storage", there is "Disk Management". Click on it and it will show you all your drives (and partitions). Right click the missing "drives" and delete partition.

[markj85]

I did that but they dont show up on disk management...

[Skydawg]

Hrrm... Never really liked Partition Magic, always had probs with it. Sounds like PM left some signature behind for the drives (partitions), you don't happen to have an old copy of fdisk (microsoft) version laying around?

[markj85]

I dont think I have fdisk...These drives dont even show up in partition magic.

[Skydawg]

PM isn't the greatest program in the world to use for moving, resizing or renaming partintions...Acronis is the program you want to do this with, sorry you used PM in the first place. This of course is from my experience with it, it never worked corretly. fdisk is a dos based partition manager, was just wondering if you had an old copy laying around, if fdisk could see and delete them.

Also from past experience with dual booting and having two operating systems on one box, strange things happen...I have just taken the easy way out, saved all my data and reloaded. With the way 2000 and XP are, there is no reason to partition the drive, unless you just like to have partitions.