please help im a vista 64 bit user and my spare internal hard drive wont format.it keeps telling me that the drive is in use but i know it is not virtual ram as i have put this to zero.i can quick format but this does not sort it out.please help.glynn.

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Right click on the drive > properties > security tab, check 'full control' is ticked for all accounts you use, if not goto edit and check the boxes, if you have done that and it still doesnt work, delete everything on the internal drive and see which files wont delete, then tell us which files it won't delete and we will see how we can help.

I'm curious as your choice of words. You said you set Virtual memory to zero on that drive. Do you mean you set it to none? Or did you set it to the number zero? if none, did you reboot after? I have found a couple of drives (external USB) that I was only able to rebuild by using the DISKPART command line program. It has to be run as Administrator and it is possible to kill your system if you are not careful. If you decide to use DISKPART, I suggest you have DISKMGMT.MSC running in another window to refer to when selecting drives. If you need instructions on how to proceed I can walk you through it.

do yuo have win 98 installation disk,then you can format your hdd by using it. rememberyou should create partition in hdd by win 98

You could also download and burn gparted, then boot off the CD or USB to run the partition tool to do the format.

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