Reference number: CH000341

How to manually remove hard drive compression.

Issue:

How to manually remove hard drive compression.

Reason:

Unfortunately, when a hard disk drive is compressed, it is generally never able to be uncompressed. Therefore, it may be necessary to manually remove the compression. Because of the structure the hard drive is put in, the below solution will erase all information from the hard disk drive. It is recommended that all data be backed up before following the below solution.

Solution:

As mentioned above, the below solution will erase all information from the hard disk drive but will allow the computer to be formatted and will remove the compression from the hard disk drive.

1. Boot from a bootable floppy diskette that contains the fdisk file. Additional information about creating a bootable diskette can be found on our boot disk page.
2. Run fdisk once at the DOS prompt.
3. Within fdisk delete the primary partition and/or all partitions on the computer.
4. Once deleted, reboot the computer again with the bootable floppy diskette.
5. Run fdisk again once at the DOS prompt.
6. Recreate the primary partition. 

Once the partition has been successfully removed and then added, run format command and reinstall your operating system. 

Additional information:

• See document CH000186 for additional information about erasing your hard disk drive and starting over.