Formatting a drive in windows 7

[hadiz]

Here's my deal. I have two 250GB hard drives. One had Vista on it (Drive X), the other was just to store music and stuff (Drive Y). So windows 7 comes out. I move everything from the Y drive onto the X drive, so I can format it and install 7 on Y. So now I'm running windows 7 on drive Y, and that's all good. However, I've cleared off the X drive, but it won't let me format it because it says it's a system drive. I want to go back to using it as storage, but as it stands a good chunk of it is a windows installation that 7 won't let me delete.

Any suggestions?

[hdood]

System volume = what holds the boot loader (BCD)

Boot volume = what holds the OS itself (Y in this case)

In this case I suspect X is the first partition on the drive and thus had the boot loader placed on it (in other words is the system volume). This would have to be moved to Y and Y then set active.

[ajua]

If you don't have anything left on the X drive, you can erase all partitions on it and see if you can now format it properly.

If you still can't, try Parted Magic or something similar and boot from your cd/dvd drive. In most cases, this solves problems with boot loaders or previous system partitions.

[+BudMan MVC]

What I would suggest is pull the drive out you want to use as storage, and then repair your win7 install. Once that is working with one drive then attach your storage drive and delete it.

This way you will know for sure there is nothing on that storage drive that windows 7 needs to boot/run, etc.

If after you reattach it the disk manager will not let you delete its partition or reformat it. Then just do it using the windows 7 media, boot from it and use the command console or when your in the setup phase you create/delete partitions, etc.