Whatever.

"R. C. White" wrote in message
...
Hi, Colin.

You cannot format the system drive (C in Windows. It will stop you.

Agreed!

Attempting to merge drives C: and D: in Drive Manager, however, removes
all partition information. The message you are getting says it all.

Huh? What is Drive Manager? I know the WinNT4 utility Disk Manager. And
I know the much-more-capable Win2K/XP utility Disk Management. But I'm
not sure if I ever heard of Drive Manager? Was this just a slip of the
tongue (or finger), or did you mean a different program? Maybe one that
Sony supplies?

In Disk Management, there's no way that I know of to even attempt to
"merge" partitions. Or to directly convert a logical drive to a
partition, primary or otherwise. Zattack would have had to: (1) delete
logical Drive D:, leaving the extended partition empty; (2) delete the
empty extended partition; then (3) create a new primary partition in the
now-unallocated space. Then he could format Drive D: and use it.

But this should not have left him unable to boot to WinXP still on C:.
The message he is getting (operating system not found) should not appear
in that case.

I'll try to reply to Zattack's latest post, but I might not be able to do
that until tomorrow.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP

"Colin Barnhorst" wrote in message
...
You cannot format the system drive (C in Windows. It will stop you.
Attempting to merge drives C: and D: in Drive Manager, however, removes
all partition information. The message you are getting says it all.

It is likely that the D: drive was a small partition (probably 1GB or so)
designed for backing up your Documents and Settings folder. If so,
merging the two might not gain you much. However you recover from this,
I suggest you buy an external hard drive to use to back up your system
regularly. If you decide to shop for an external drive, keep in mind
that your laptop should have a usb port to take advantage of an external
device and that you can buy external drives with bundled backup software.
Buy a drive that is at least double the size of the drive in your laptop.
It will also come in handy for storing some of the things that prompted
you to try to make more space.

Use the restore disks that came with your computer. Your laptop requires
motherboard drivers, device drivers, and utility programs that are
specific for your computer and you need the restore program to get those
back onto your system. Good luck.

"Zattack" wrote in message
...
I may be too late but... Have sony vaio laptop with XP home. Had drive
partitioned to a c primary and d extended. Ran into issues as the c
drive
was full and nothing was going to d. Went into drive management and
formatted d drive, as only data stored there was copies of program files
that also existed in c drive. Upon attmpt to make it merge back with c
drive, formatted it to also be primary drive. Didn't touch c drive, but
upon restart laptop only displays one message: operating system not
found.

I have Sony recovery disks but they simply prompt me to totally reformat
and
start installation of system. Have I lost my data and is there any way
to
get the laptop to boot correctly to for now at least get back to where I
was
before the issues?