I have a dual-boot Linux/Windows 2000 system. I recently reormatted one of my partitions in Linux. Before I reformatted it, I removed the partition and booted up Win2k, which could no longer find the drive (obviously) and had no problems about this.

Now that I have reformatted it in Linux, Win2k does a hard disk check on every boot, checks the disk, says there are errors and then continues. When it starts, it takes a good 5 minutes to log in (I have automatic login), and then complains about a directory being missing (E:\Documents and Settings\Guy Griffiths\Start Menu\Programs). The drive I have removed is the L: drive, and when I use Windows Explorer, I can find the directory it informs me is missing.
I have tried using TweakUI to remove the hard drive (L:) from being shown on "My Computer" to no effect.

Does anyone know how I can stop Win2K searching for a drive that is no longer FAT formatted?

I have tried removing the partition again, and Windows behaves well, it is only when it is present that problems occur.

If anyone could help me fix this matter, I would be most grateful, since at the moment I am thinking I may have to reinstall Win2k, which is something which I do NOT want to do.
Thanks
Guy

Sidenote:
I initially partitioned my hard drive with a few Linux ext3 partitions, and few FAT32 partitions and one NTFS partition. Then when I installed Windows, it said that some drives were not formatted (the Linux ones) but did not try and check them on boot. No problems came from this (I hid them using TweskUI)

The last time I had this problem was when I reformatted part of my drive to ext3 so I could make it my /home dir. The fix? For me all I did was change the drive back to FAT32, boot into Windoze, remove the drive through computer management, and then convert it back to ext3 and mount it as /home. If you don't remove the drive from Windoze first, then it freaks out when you reboot.

slight

Excellent, cheers.
I tried using Computer Management to remove the drive but it went a bit crazy and crashed. I will try backing up and restoring to FAT32 and then do it though.
Guy

I am almost positive that the drive has to be fat/fat32/NTFS when you remove it under computer management.
Good luck!

slight

To clarify, and in case anyone runs across this whilst searching for the same problem, this is what worked for me:
Remove partition completely in Linux
Go into Windows disk management (control panel, admin tools, and it's under storage)
Right-click and select partition.
Then partition it, but don't format or assign it a drive letter
If you have other Linux partitions, it should now look the same as them (i.e. blank square, no drive label, doesn't say "healthy" etc.)
Now Windows thinks its a blank partition ready to have something done about it, and won't look at it again.
Now you can do what you want in Linux

Which is what slightcrazed says - this is how you have to remove the drive.

Thanks a lot slightcrazed, you solved the problem a treat
Guy