Hard Drive Woes

AdMMM

Me again,

Today I got a new HDD (Maxtor 250gb), however I seem to be having a bit of difficulty in setting it up. First off, I set the jumpers to slave and then I booted up and got the BIOS to detect the hard drive which it correctly did. I then booted up into windows and windows said it found new hardware (Disk Drive), however the drive doesn't appear to be appearing on My Computer but does appear to be "working correctly" in the Device Manager. When I select "volumes" from the properties of the hard drive from the Device Manager and choose to populate it it says the drives capacity is 0 and it does not give a driver letter like it does for my primary HDD.

I bought this drive with the understanding that it had been formatted previously (it has been tested on XP) so I'm rather stumped as to why I can't access it!

I'm running XP with an Aopen AK77 8XN motherboard which is based on the VIA Kt400 chipset

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks
Adam

moridin

I bought this drive with the understanding that it had been formatted previously (it has been tested on XP) so I'm rather stumped as to why I can't access it!

how so? Usually when you get a new disk it's supplied unformatted. Have you tried partitioning/formatting the drive yourself?

AdMMM

Since XP that's only possible with an XP cd right? I actually don't have one atm

daywalker

if you right-click my computer and select manage, then in the storage menu in the computer management screen, select disk management, right click the new drive and select format. Drive should appear as normal in windows.

angelofdeath

irc wrote:

(16:28:44) (+dAc^Murderer) rofl just got my HDD in the post just there, I eaglerly opened it and it fell out onto the ground

might that have anything to do with it:D

seriously though, yeah i second the above, i don't think harddrives come formatted

AdMMM

angelofdeath wrote:

might that have anything to do with it:D

seriously though, yeah i second the above, i don't think harddrives come formatted

Well it did fortunately fall onto a padded rug and there didn't appear to be any damage caused to the drive, I gently shook the drive after I picked it up and I didn't hear anything bounce around so I assume it's okay especially because both the BIOS and Windows have identified the drive correctly.

The drive isn't brand new though, I bought it second hand, however it belonged to a computer repair type guy beforehand and he said that the drive was tested on XP so I assumed that it had been formatted but maybe he only did the same as me to see if it worked and didn't format it. I'll do that later!

AdMMM

It appears the disk was set to dynamic under disk management. I converted it to basic and created a partition on it and now it seems to be working fine (well it's formatting it anyway).