Hard Disk Help Needed

[Aunty Em]

I've just put a second physical HDD onto my comp as I'm checking it out before putting it into my daughters computer. It's an old Seagate Medallist 2.1 GB.

It is recognised in the Bios and registers in Device Manager but does not show up in My Computer.

My main drive is a Matrox 40GB 5400rpm partitioned into logical drives C and D. My CD-RW is E and my DVD is F. These are recognised.

My OS is ME.

Any suggestions as to what to do?

 

[PT]

Had it been formatted for Linux or something before? I'd say that the problem is that it is not formatted in Fat32 or NTFS, depending on what OS you have. Go into Fdisk and clear all partitions from that drive, then format it, it should show up fine then.

 

[Aunty Em]

I have never used FDISK, how do I?

Do I boot into Dos?

 

[PT]

Yep, boot into Dos, then type Fdisk. It will have a menu, you will have to know which hard drive is which, you should be able to tell by the size, as long as your primary is larger. If they are the same size, or you are nervous about doing this at all, I'd disconnect your primary while you do this, just to be safe. Anyway, one of the options then is to delete partitions, do that to all of them, Logical and Physical, then create one partition, Format, and you should be ready to go.

 

[Aunty Em]

My C drive is 18.9 GB so I think I'll know the difference. Thanks. Here goes nothing...

 

[Aunty Em]

Thanks for the help PT - the drive is now partitioned, formatted, scanned and working fine. :thumb:

 

[PT]

 

[outside looking in]

 

[Justintime]

why? just go out and get a nice cheap 40-60GB and chuck that minature piece of slow crap out da door

 

[Aunty Em]

why? just go out and get a nice cheap 40-60GB and chuck that minature piece of slow crap out da door

They're not that cheap here and I'm saving all my pennies to upgrade my own computer after christmas.

Actually it doubles her HDD space, her main drive is a Samsung 2.1GB of which 1.1 GB is used, most of her programs(about 60) only take up 5 - 10MBs each and only require 233 MHz cpu. This is just for storage of her pictures, writing, etc. and since it was free I can't complain. She's only running an Intel Celeron 500MHz on an A-Bit SE6 mobo with 128MB PC100 SD-Ram and onboard sound and graphics.

Anyway it also gives me an excuse to practice things I haven't tried before.

 

[Professur]

Had it been formatted for Linux or something before? I'd say that the problem is that it is not formatted in Fat32 or NTFS, depending on what OS you have. Go into Fdisk and clear all partitions from that drive, then format it, it should show up fine then.

Um, if she clears all the aprtitions, what is she supposed to format?

 

[Gonz]

If TweakUI was used, recheck (fill in wanted drive letters here)

 

[Aunty Em]

Had it been formatted for Linux or something before? I'd say that the problem is that it is not formatted in Fat32 or NTFS, depending on what OS you have. Go into Fdisk and clear all partitions from that drive, then format it, it should show up fine then.

Um, if she clears all the aprtitions, what is she supposed to format?

When I FDisked it as one primary partitian and formatted it as Fat32, as a slave on my computer, it was fine. However, for some reason it wouldn't show up on Katie's computer as a slave to the Samsung, so I tried them with the Seagate as the primary master and the Samsung as primary slave (I was going to try other configurations but it wasn't necessary) and they are now working happily together. I reinstalled windows and the utility programs I use for maintenance on the master (including Drive Image 5.0) and installed all Katie's programs on the slave, including a backup image of the operating system so that if she mucks it up again I just have to boot into dos with the DI recovery disks and format and restore the image. Saves me a hell of a lot of hassle.

It also means that when I get her a larger drive I can just copy the image to a 2 GB primary active partition on the new drive and lock her out of it more easily.

 

[PT]

Had it been formatted for Linux or something before? I'd say that the problem is that it is not formatted in Fat32 or NTFS, depending on what OS you have. Go into Fdisk and clear all partitions from that drive, then format it, it should show up fine then.

Um, if she clears all the aprtitions, what is she supposed to format?

OK, good point, but if you read on...

Yep, boot into Dos, then type Fdisk. It will have a menu, you will have to know which hard drive is which, you should be able to tell by the size, as long as your primary is larger. If they are the same size, or you are nervous about doing this at all, I'd disconnect your primary while you do this, just to be safe. Anyway, one of the options then is to delete partitions, do that to all of them, Logical and Physical, then create one partition, Format, and you should be ready to go.

I did a little better job of explaining it there.

 

[PT]

I reinstalled windows and the utility programs I use for maintenance on the master (including Drive Image 5.0) and installed all Katie's programs on the slave, including a backup image of the operating system so that if she mucks it up again I just have to boot into dos with the DI recovery disks and format and restore the image. Saves me a hell of a lot of hassle.

It also means that when I get her a larger drive I can just copy the image to a 2 GB primary active partition on the new drive and lock her out of it more easily.

That's a great idea, I did that to my own for when I muck it up.