I have a Dell Inspiron E1505 which I formatted recently to install Mac OSX. Basically this is what I have done:
Formatted the c:\ drive creating a separate partition of about 50 GB ( out of 80 GB..so my C:\ is now 30GB and the new drive M:\ is 50GB)
This new M:\ drive is formatted to be Fat32 while C:\ is NTFS
My whole point is to have a dual boot with Windows and Mac OSX. However I was not successful in getting the Mac OSX installed on it.
It was working great until recently when it started to hang after 5 mins. It's been pretty consistent. Once it hangs, if i press any button it would have a loud continuous beep sound. I have to shut it down basically.
Can someone please let me now what's wrong with it?
Since I was not able to fix it, I wanted to reinstall the OS…I have the Dell CDs. so, I am fine with it. But, now I am having a problem. After inserting the OS DVDand booting it on DVD, I am not able to run the format command on c:\ drive. It says unknown format or drive not correct. Obviuosly the drive is correct. I am guessing that it's getting confused as I had earlier partitioned the c:\ drive and formatted it to be ( partially i.e the m:\ drive) a FAT32. Now I went to Disk management and removed the logical partition of m:\ and formatted it. I was however not able to delete the partition ( Delete partition is grayed out on m:)
Even after all this I was not able to format the c:\ drive. Same error message.
Any inputs?
Best Answer
can you delete the partitions from the installer? just delete the partitions from the windows installer and start over - no need to format what's already there.
and FYI, since it's a dell, it may have a small partition at the beginning of the disk(100 MB or so). this is where the testing and recovery tools are installed. if you see that partition, it's ok to leave. or you can delete it - it's up to you, but a dell support agent may ask you to run these if you ever have to call in