Cannot Format D-Drive (2nd hard drive)

[bladesgore]

I have a second hard drive, which I recovered a deleted file into. I went into the find the recovered file, but it wasn't there, even though it used up a few gigabytes of space. I'm now frustrated, and I want to format the drive. It kept saying "being used by another process" or something like that, anyways, I went into the hard drive and deleted everything myself. The hard drive is now empty, but it still has about 16gigs of space being used, even though the drive is completely empty.

The software I used to recover my file was "Recuva". I uninstalled it, so it shouldn't be interfering with the formatting. Is there anyway to force format the hard drive???

Please help!

Thank you.

 

[Lee]

Use your Windows install disc. When it gets to the point where it ask you where you want to install Win 7 indicate that drive. Then format the disc. Now exit the installation. If you cannot get that one to work then attempt it with a XP installation disc.

Another way is to go to your Control Panel and choice Administration Tools then go to Computer Management. From there go to Disk management. Once there right click on the Drive then click on Delete Volume. Once that is done, reformat. Hope this helps.

 

[bladesgore]

It won't let me delete volume, the option is faded out. Also, I have an HP envy 17 laptop, it didn't come with any CDs.

 

[Bill2]

Use Diskpart to delete the volume. See Method 2 in this tut.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2668-partition-volume-delete.html

 

[bladesgore]

I tried diskpart. It didn't let me delete the volume, it said it was in use. I then tried to delete it through override, but that wasn't allowed for it, because it is a "Pagefile".

 

[Bill2]

Can you provide a snipshot of the disk management window?

 

[bladesgore]

Here you go:

 

[bladesgore]

It is the D- Drive which I can't format.

 

[Bill2]

You can try moving the pagefile off the D: drive.

Performance Boost: Move Page File to Another Physical Drive | Windows Vista Maintenance | Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Alternatively, you can try a 3rd party partition manager like Partition Wizard to delete that volume.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93322-partition-wizard-use-bootable-cd.html?ltr=P

 

[bladesgore]

I went into the my computer advanced virtual memory properties, and clicked on the "No paging file" option, and set it. I was able to format the drive having done that.

My question is, will setting this drive, which is my extra hard drive, create any future problems?

 

[Bill2]

Since D: was a data drive, there was no reason for the pagefile to be there in the first place, unless you moved it there. I see that there's already a pagefile on the windows partition and since you also have 8 gb of ram, there should be no issue whatsoever.

Page file is a temporary area on the hard disk which windows will utilize as memory when its short of actual RAM, such as when you have a large no. of programs open that demand a lot of memory.

 

[bladesgore]

I see. Thank you very much for your help, and the others too. I appreciate it very much guys!