Slave Hard Disk prob, help needed!

Bubba · 14-12-2005 7:37pm #1

Windows XP

Ok so i just put my brother's hard drive into my machine and set it as the primary slave. Everything is set up ok as i can see it in the BIOS settings and it recognises it there.

My problem is that i can't get into the drive. When i'm in 'My Computer' and try to explore the drive it comes up with
'this drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now, yes or no'

and i click no because there is files on it i want. then it just does nothing.

so how can i get into this drive without formatting it?

Please help, thanks alot

Karoma · 14-12-2005 7:40pm

What filesystem was it? What OS did your brother have?

Cake Fiend · 14-12-2005 7:52pm

Run Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and see if XP sees that a partition exists, and if it recognizes the filesystem.

Bubba · 14-12-2005 7:52pm

he was running XP aswell, and its just a new drive. not much on it

Bubba · 14-12-2005 8:00pm

yeah i ran 'disk management'

but i don't get it, because its an 80gig drive and it says here that its only a 31.50gig drive?? what the hell!

it does say parition under it

and it says nothing under file system, and under my other hard disk it's NTFS.

so now what?

Bubba · 14-12-2005 8:04pm

do i delete the parition?

what is a parition?

Karoma · 14-12-2005 8:04pm

was he running XP Pro?

Bubba · 14-12-2005 8:09pm

yeah both XP pro.

why would that make a difference?

Bubba · 14-12-2005 10:45pm

Ok so look i formatted it, it dosn't matter about the files cause i need the hard drive. anyway i can use it now and store files on it as normal.

the only thing is, its an 80gig drive and for some reason it says its a 30gig drive. why the hell is this? sorry but its really annoying me now!!

thanks for any help,
Bubba

steveland? · 15-12-2005 2:13am

It was probably partitioned into 2 partitions.

A 30GB one and a 50GB one.

When you go to Disk Management is there a big empty unformatted space beside the 30GB partition?

If there is select it and format it. It should appear as a seperate 50GB Drive then in My Computer.

Bubba · 15-12-2005 5:49pm

steveland? wrote:

It was probably partitioned into 2 partitions.

A 30GB one and a 50GB one.

When you go to Disk Management is there a big empty unformatted space beside the 30GB partition?

If there is select it and format it. It should appear as a seperate 50GB Drive then in My Computer.

No there isn't, there's just one long section, one long blue line. its not broken into 2.

Bubba · 15-12-2005 5:55pm

The weird thing is is that when i go into setup and check the bios, it says that the hard disk is only 30gig there aswell. or does that not matter because there is something causing a problem!

i will actually give someone an award if they can sort this out!!

Spacedog · 15-12-2005 6:02pm

sounds like you havn't got SP2 installed, I think they changed NTFS between versions of XP, if he formatted his drive using a newer version of XP, maybe it's incompatable?

I was reinstalling XP (old version) this week to a 320GB drive and it could only see 130GB of it until I updated to SP2.

Bubba · 15-12-2005 6:10pm

NO i have SP2 but he was only running SP1.

ahh is that what was wrong? emm ok so if that is the problem what can i do??

EOA_Mushy · 15-12-2005 7:40pm

plug the disk back into your brothers machine.
delete any partitions found on it, do not format or create a new partition.
plug it back into your machine.
Format.

Bubba · 15-12-2005 9:41pm

EOA_Mushy wrote:

plug the disk back into your brothers machine.
delete any partitions found on it, do not format or create a new partition.
plug it back into your machine.
Format.

don't think i'll be able to. his computer is f***ed! that's partly the reason i took the hard drive out because it was just bought bought a couple of weeks ago. is there any other way? like his computer dosn't turn on. it just gets stuck at the log in screen.

any other way?

EOA_Mushy · 15-12-2005 10:10pm

Put it in your or his machine as the primary drive.
Boot of the XP C.D. and delete all partitions you find.

Failing that...

Hit it with a magnitised hammer!
(Fixes every thing)

Bubba · 15-12-2005 10:24pm

EOA_Mushy wrote:

Put it in your or his machine as the primary drive.
Boot of the XP C.D. and delete all partitions you find.

Failing that...

Hit it with a magnitised hammer!
(Fixes every thing)

ok, but will i be able to do that? by booting it from the XP cd will it not just ask me do i want to install windows? do i have an option to partition?

Balfa · 15-12-2005 10:41pm

If your BIOS can't see more than 32GB, it's nothing to do with Windows. Update your BIOS.

Or follow the long and complicated instructions here:
http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/63Sector.htm

steveland? · 15-12-2005 11:34pm

Bubba wrote:

ok, but will i be able to do that? by booting it from the XP cd will it not just ask me do i want to install windows? do i have an option to partition?

Nah just take out both the hard drives, plug in the 80GB as master, boot up with XP CD in, when it gets to the screen where you can create/delete partitions just delete the partition and then turn off the PC, plug the two HDDs in (the original setup with the 80GB as Slave)

Now go to computer management and format the drive (should pop up as unpartitioned space).

Although if it only shows up as a 32GB drive in your BIOS then do what Balfa said.

steveland? · 16-12-2005 12:40am

Just found this... could be nothing but is the jumper at hte back of the drive set to limit drive capacity?

Seems coincidental it's 32GB

Balfa · 16-12-2005 3:34am

Yeah, It talks about those jumpers at the URL I posted. Lots of drives have them specifically because older BIOSes often can't recognise drives that big, but most old BIOSes seem to just recognise it up to 32GB rather than not recognising at all, which is what the jumper's supposed to solve. The fact that it worked okay in his brother's machine at full size would suggest that any jumpers it might have are set correctly. It's pretty hard to accidently set a jumper, though it's certainly possible for some people

EOA_Mushy · 16-12-2005 11:10am

steveland? wrote:

Nah just take out both the hard drives, plug in the 80GB as master, boot up with XP CD in, when it gets to the screen where you can create/delete partitions just delete the partition and then turn off the PC, plug the two HDDs in (the original setup with the 80GB as Slave)

Now go to computer management and format the drive (should pop up as unpartitioned space).

Although if it only shows up as a 32GB drive in your BIOS then do what Balfa said.

Is exactly what I meant... Apologies if misunderstood

steveland? · 16-12-2005 5:05pm

EOA_Mushy wrote:

Is exactly what I meant... Apologies if misunderstood

Yeh, just clearing it up since the OP didn't seem to know that you can just delete partitions without installing the OS

pdogs · 17-12-2005 1:52am

It sure sounds like a BIOS limitation or an incorrect manual/retained setting in the BIOS setup. You could try using autodetect in the BIOS setup and see if that gives the drive the correct geometry and size in the setup. If a BIOS upgrade then doesn't work you have the options of using DDO (not recommended) or buy a cheap PCI controller card.

Dont partition format etc etc whilst the drive is not properly detected.

Slave Hard Disk prob, help needed!

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