Cannot Format Secondary drive

[Prodigy146]

hi, i recently put in a sata drive in to replace my ide drive.

i installed vista on my sata and my ide drive still had vista on it. when i tried to format it, it said that windows is unable to format. i went to msconfig and deleted the boot record, i even tried deleting the files from the drive and it said access is denied.

here is a screenshot of my disk managment window


http://g.imageshack.us/img58/drivedm2.jpg/1/

Now disk 0 is my ide drive and i no longer use it. Disk 1 is my main drive. now what i dont get is why my inactive drive is disk 0? what do i have to do to fix this?

 

[stratusdodge]

You could try putting it in another computer and formatting it as a FAT32. That seems to be a universal format.

 

[Prodigy146]

i cant believe this but i cant boot my sata drive without the ide drive. when i disconnected my ide drive, it said

Grub Stage 1.5 Loading
Error



i've never had ubuntu installed on my computer

 

[CrossCech]

If it were me, I'd get out the Vista install disk. Boot from it and go to the screen where it asks you where you want to install. Select the IDE drive and choose drive options. Delete the drive ... you should be able to tell which drive is which ... from your disk managment screen it shows your IDE as a 40 gb drive and your SATA as 80 gb.
Then I would turn off the computer after you delete the IDE drive. Disconnect the IDE drive just to be sure you don't install to it. Reboot with Vista install disk and re-install Vista to the SATA drive.

 

[A True Folder]

Have you tried deleting the partition and recreating it?

This may disrupt your BCD though (which would require a rebuild) as it sounds like your second install has written to the boot sector on the old IDE hdd.

CrossCeh's method may also work.

Either way you're going to have to rebuild the Vista BCD

 

[Prodigy146]

ok i finally figured it out. my bootloader and boot manager is on the ide drive. somehow i am using my old vistas windows files from my ide drive to boot my main sata drive

now why the hell would that happen

 

[CrossCech]

Your bios could be thinking your IDE is the hard drive of choice to boot from.

CrossCeh's method may also work.

Not a question of "may also work" ... it will work. Just a matter of if Prodigy wants to start over or beat his head against the wall all day long trying to figure out why his boot loader is jacked up.