I've got a second disk installed on my new desktop that I am trying to format, but nothing is working. I tried running the format command from the command prompt and it said "Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if the volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume?" I said yes "Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use." I then tried rebooting the system and got the same result. I also tried formatting it from Windows Explorer, but got an error message that says "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of this drive. Then try formatting again" Where do I go from here?
Go into disk management and right click the drive, should be Disc 1 (in the bottom section) then select offline. Instruction linky.
Ok, tried that, didn't work. in the GUI Disk management program the "offline" option is greyed out and in the command line tool it says that "The operation is not allowed on a disk that contains a pagefile volume." This disk was has a previous install of Win7 on it and after deleting everything I could, it stills shows 17.5 GB of used space on the disk, appearently in hidden files.
Sounds like windows automatically started using the drive for a page file. Right-click Computer. Select Properties. Select Advanced system settings. Select the Advanced tab and then the Performance radio button. Select the Change box under Virtual memory. Un-check Automatically manage paging file size for all drives. Remove paging from the offending drive. Profit??
