My brother has a desktop with 1Tb disk space. It has 6 partions and had a win8 on it. Thanks to microsoft craps, every 2 or 3 months it need to reinstall Os.
This time windows was unable to format drive C. With ubuntu live cd I tried to format Drive with Gparted tools but that was not possible. The dd command is not workig too and says: permission is denied.
How can I format this drive (without loosing data from other drive)?

Whoa Whoa Whoa. (Be careful what you are doing!)

1) You only mention *one* drive
2) DD has nothing to do with formatting

What do you *actually* want to do here?

Are you asking how to clear and re-format a partition of a drive with an NTFS(windows) filesystem?

in general windows should not be re/installed in every 2 or 3 months. Otherwise you would need to describe what did you try. please give us much more details. (what commands were executed, what was the error message). Probably your disk was damaged.

Well, that's a Linux forum here, but if it was a Win8 machine, did you try to use the Windows maintenance console to find out what the problem was?
What output from which tools did you get when you tried to fix you rissue?

btw: there is no such thing like "Microsoft craps", even MS software has its use, and if it's used right and set up/maintained properly, it can give you a stable and performand system.

I agree with the others. There is a lot to this issue.


A newest live cd/dvd version of opensuse or ubuntu or fedora ought to allow you to use disk tools. Most live cd's run in admin or root but you may have to unmount the drive to do tasks.

Why reinstall every 2 or 3 month? I'm not using that system but after 2 month the the os speed become lower then old dialup internet and or Regine is full virus environment for windows. I don't know but here every body reinstall windows every 3 or 4 months (may be 6).
Why microsoft crap? compare to linux or mac, u can find why. For example When powering of the win8 it's going to hiebernate and there is no shut down there. This is why in win8 installing updates only work when u restart the system. I think microsoft cheats to show win8 has a very good boot time. For notice my brother forced to use windows and he love linux beacuse it's stable and feel right. (Some Microsof products are unique but I don't like it).
Why using linux for format? Because, windows installer program can't format the drive. sometimes happens windows can not format a usb and linux come handy.
All I need is to format Drive C in one format (ext, ntfs, fat,....). If I can format it once then I can change it again to ntfs.

Linux isn't immune from bad practices. You'd need to learn and use as many good or best practices as you can to avoid this sort of issue. A well managed windows should not have these issues.

Some of the replies suggest that if windows can't fix it, then there may be some other issues that have to do with hardware.

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that sounds like the normal windows behavior
with full temp files
and full IE9 cache and temp files

toss in any of the likely "tool-bars" installed to IE9
as to viruses
why not use any of the FREE AV tools
in 13 years of using Windows i had only 2 ( TWO ) major infections
and a few bad downloads that did not install

NO but maybe ONE time a year ?? maybe ???
for a "spring cleaning" but that was for XP
and after a upgrade to SP1 then after SP2 , and then after SP3

cleaning out the "cumulative updates" ( hot fixes ) with the service pack , will speed things up .


for formatting drives a LIVE cd like "Gparted live CD" or " SystemRescueCD"
work the BEST

as stated above "dd" should not come into this
it has NOTHING to do with formatting
However,there is ONE exception .

Zeroing out a drive
this may or might NOT allow windows to use the drive .
and for a 1 TiB drive ,that might take 24 hours to run .

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