Hi,

I have 2 Sata Drives. I Installed Windows XP on my C drive and as far as I know all my WIndows files are on C drive BUT once before a long time ago I formatted my D drive and Windows wouldn't boot.

Now I have bought an external hard drive and moved all my data from D drive to this external drive. Yet D drive still shows 1 and a half GB of the drive as missing. When I open the folder it's empty and when I allow 'hidden files' it still shows nothing. So i went into programs like Diskeeper and found that there is a pagefile.sys. boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM and ntldr. the Path says :

(RECYCLER) (System Volume Information) -

this is the information I could find in Diskeeper when I looked at the 'exclude files' option there. So there is information of 1 1/2 GB on the my D drive. Can I format the drive as I want a clean hard drive or do I need it for booting into Windows?

Dave

The 1G is in the System Volume Information Directory and the pagefile.sys. The System Volume Information contains the restore points for that drive and the pagefile.sys is your virtual memory. It appears that your system is set to save the pagefile on the second hdd.

1. You can turn off system restore on that drive by going in System Properties/System Restore
2. You can change the location of the page file by going in System Properties/Advanced/Performance Settings/Advanced click Change, highlight your drive and click Set.

Boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM and ntldr are necessary when to boot into Windows however I'm wondering if you don't have this files available on your C drive as well. If you don't see them there and if your computer is booting from the second drive and then launching the operating system from C formatting the second hard drive will cause your system to stop booting. That can be changed but we need first to know if the specified files are located on the root of the C drive as well.