What brand of hard drive is it?

Hitachi HTS541616J9S SCSI Disk Device

My laptop is an ACER Aspire 9300

Well here is a thought, even though you may have installed the OS to d:, the installation still may have put some files on C: drive and that could be reason why being locked out of the format process.

Also if your drive is partitioned to C and D and it is an Acer, Acer more than likely has files on C: (whether hidden or not) the Acer needs to have and therefore will not let you format it.



With all these things to consider, I would maybe suggest to delete all old files and folders that you can (it let's you) and you should be left with pretty much an empty drive.

Start right clicking and delete folders until nothing left as that is the goal other than just doing the format.

Try that and see what files/folders are left over that the system will not let you delete, this may narrow down what might not be giving you access to format the drive.

I tried that and it left me with 30 gb of stuff on my C drive that I could not delete which is basically half the gb on the C drive

They all say I need permssion from 'TrustedInstalled' to make any changes

Are there specific folder you can not delete?

Are they old windows folders from the old system?

I could recommend DBAN which will totally wipe out the drive but with that said, you may not be able to boot back to win7 and just have to reinstall but that would be an option if you are choosing only to run win7

And after using dban, you would have to use the format option during install as your drives will be wiped clean.

Or the other option with out having to reinstall is to use a disk parititoning software

Partition Wizard Home Edition free download. Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager designed by MT Solution Ltd. It supports 32/64 bit Windows Operating System including Window...


With this, install and run (Be Very to only make changes to drive you want, a mistake could be Bad)

Now with this installed, you will be able to manage partition c: as far as in your case,

Remove partition c:
Recreate partition c:
Format partition c:


But Very Important, Acer may need that drive to be able to boot and if you wipe it and recreate it, the laptop may not boot and you would have to do a system recovery from Acer Recovery software

You may want to email Acer and ask them through email support, Can I and how do I format C: or is C: needed.


***Now with all that information to consider, I would also suggest to do the Acer recovery process to get laptop back to factory settings as when you first bought it, and then, run the win7 installation as an Upgrade.

Yes there are specific folders I cannot delete
i.e windows sidebar, windows journal windows movie maker, all say I need permission from trustedinstalled, I can't even delete notepad :(

Yes there are system files that I cannot delete as well from the old windows but mostly applications

Ill email Acer as you suggested to see if they can help/suggest anything I actually need to use some programs on my laptop for work at the moment and hence am hesitant about wiping the entire laptop clean and starting from scratch, so if that turns out to be the case I won't be able to give that a go until after the new year.

Well, as mentioned

You can use the partition software to wipe c:, recreate it and format it - and your done.

This will not effect your installation of win 7 on d:, would co nsider starting from scratch and putting your OS on c:

These are all just concerns as most OS's are on C: but of course not all - My xp PC is installed on d:

To be honest, I do not know how much time you have insvested in this win 7 installation, you may want to consider starting from scratch (IF that is your choice to say with win 7)

OK, the way I read it it sounded like I had to wipe the drives clean and then partition, so I may give that a try,

I haven't got that much invested with this instalation, basically just the essentials: iTunes, visual studio, XNA, Steam etc

So like I said if I were to totally wipe everything and start from scratch id have to wait untilafter the new year as I need to get my work done and hence am quite hesitant.

If I do end up starting from scratch id probably be looking for help as I'm not entirely sure how it should play out and what I should look out for, but that would be after new year.

Do what you can do now and see if anything comes up but I would suggest as mentioned above is to recover the laptop back to acer recovery to get back to factory setup and then run the upgrade if that is what you want to do - I would suggest this route other than wiping the drive and then installing, just do the updgrade from a fresh system recovery

OK, thanks for the help, I will have a poke around see if anything changes, and if not try the acer recovery and get back to you after new year and tell you how it went.

Just wondering if you found a solution?

The only way to get back your partioned space from the Cdive and end up with an installation that utilises your total drive capacity in a single partition is to start again!
Boot from the windows 7 CD and when you reach the point of specifying installation partition choose to delete both and then create a new single partition using the full drive and complete the installation to this drive.

You mention you have ITunes etc already installed, these are easy to back up to an external drive before you start and then restore when ready to.

Hope this helps.

I haven't gotten round to re installing 7 yet as I have some work that I need to do and I don't want to mess around with anything before I've handed it in

But

I've talked to a few other people and they suggest what seahawk suggested,

That it: to re-install 7 on my C drive and as you say select to wipe both drives when it reaches the partition bit (I don't remember coming across this when I first installed it but oh well)

So I'm going to do that next week