How to delete hidden/protected partition ?

C64 · 24 Jul 2010 at 00:53

I have a laptop hard drive but it has an ACER protected hidden partition ( service recovery partition ?)on it for xp home.
I deleted all partitions upon installing xp again and formatted ntfs slow but upon boot up theres still a choice between xp home (the hidden partition still there) and xp pro which I installed.

Is there any way or free software out there to remove this protected partition ?
Btw in disk manager I cannot see any other partitions I cant plug this drive in to my desktop as it's 2.5 IDE and i don't have an adaptor.
So can I boot in to xp on the lappy and use something like diskpart to delete the partition there ?

reygjabla · 24 Jul 2010 at 08:23

You can borrow or purchase a 2.5 IDE to sata adapter.

d_brennen · 24 Jul 2010 at 08:30

Is there actually a partition shown in drive management/my computer?

Sounds like you have a bored MBR tbh

Start > Run > MSCONFIG > Boot > Check all boot paths

Give that a bash

reygjabla · 24 Jul 2010 at 09:00

Yeah. There is. I just did it with both a Dell and a Toshiba lappy. Dell has 4 partition of which 3 is hidden and Toshiba Qozmio has 3, 2 of which is hidden also.

ANDARIAL · 29 Jul 2010 at 19:30

Gparted

Bubba · 29 Jul 2010 at 21:13

As above, probably just an invalid entry on your boot.ini. If the above does not work then you can manually edit the boot.ini yourself, it is in the c:\ drive.

If you want to check about partitions you can use the command line diskpart, be careful though not to delete anything or changing anything.

mast3r · 30 Jul 2010 at 10:08

Hirens boot CD.