Cannot Remove False System Partition Using Disk Management

When you view partitions in the Disk Management tool, 2 separate volumes (such as drive C and D) may be listed as the "system" partition. Your original dynamic system disk may be listed as "Missing" - "Offline", and you may be unable to delete this "fake" system volume. If you try to delete the false system volume, you may receive the following error message: If you try to remove the system volume status by re-formatting that partition, you may receive the following warning message: If you then click Yes to permit the format process to continue, it does not remove the false system volume status and you may still be unable to delete the volume.

This problem can occur for any of the following reasons:

• After manually breaking a "system" partition mirror on a dynamic disk, the shadow drive erroneously remains flagged as a system partition in the LDM private region database.
• The system partition was originally located on a dynamic disk and was mirrored using Windows 2000 mirroring to another dynamic disk. If the mirror fails for any reason, and both halves becomes unbootable, you may be forced to re-install Windows 2000 from scratch. Doing so creates a new system volume, but the surviving dynamic disk database still has references to the original system volume partition. This creates a condition of having two different "system" partitions on separate drives.
• A dynamic disk set that contained a "system" partition was imported into the current system. The dynamic disk set imported still has the system partition flagged in the LDM private region database.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: To work around this issue:

1. Because Disk Management won't permit you to delete the "false" system partition, backup all data located on any other volumes contained on that disk.
2. Manually delete all the partitions using the Recovery Console diskpart command to permit the "raw" drive to be re-partitioned and the data restored from your backup. For additional information about how to do so, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   229716  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/229716/EN-US/ ) Description of the Windows 2000 Recovery Console
   227364  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227364/EN-US/ ) Dynamic Volumes Are Not Displayed Accurately in Text-Mode Setup

NOTE: After deleting the physical partitions on the Dynamic disk and rebooting, You will still have a Dynamic "System" disk listed as "Missing" - "Offline". This is because all remaining Dynamic disks still have records in their databases describing the missing disk. You will not be able to delete this "phantom" disk, however it will not cause any harm.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Windows 2000 Service Pack 1.

Before deciding to re-install Windows 2000 after a disk mirror failure, try using emergency repair procedures, a fault tolerant boot diskette, or the Recovery Console to make either half of the failed mirror bootable. Once you have a bootable system partition, you can resync or re-establish the mirror. Note that this will prevent the problem described in this article from occurring.