By Luke Allanson:

I bought a 200gb hard drive, to add to my 60gb hard drive which i have basically filled, i installed the drive as a slave, onthe same ide as my master hard drive, making sure that all jumper settings are correct. I then started the computer and opened up the bios, the drive showed up fine as the primary slave device, so i started windows.
The drive shows up under the device manager, and is apparently working properly, however, the hard drive does not show up in my computer, and has no drive letter allocated. Have i missed anything? some stupid mistake ive made? any ideas on how to fix this? any feedback would be much appreciated.

Luke.

What windows are you using?

Whatever you are using the drive will probably need formatting with the correct file system.

FAT32 for win 9x or NTFS for win 2000, NT or XP.

Once its formatted windows will then be able to see and use the drive....

If you cant work DOS (and i mean real DOS not cmd!)...i cant either!....use something like partition magic 8 or 9 (needs to be a newer version as IIRC 7 can only deal with drives upto 160Gb...) to format the new drive to the correct file system. Then windows will be able to read/write with the drive... theoretically anyway...)

Cheers,
David

By Luke Allanson

Im using windows 2000 professional, which uses the ntfs system, and using windows 2000 i dont have access to a REAL dos prompt.
The problem with using partition magic on the drive is, that it doesnt show up as a drive in ym computer, and is not allocated a drive letter, which means i cant access it in partition magic, although i have had a bit of a brainwave, which may fix the problem.

I take it that you have partition magic then...

There is an option to create DOS boot disks in partition magic. These boot and load into PTM in DOS.

Create the disks, put the first one in your floppy drive and reboot, follow the onscreen prompts. Eventually it will load into PTM, you will even have mouse control.

Now select the drive you want to format, i.e. your new one, and format using the NTFS file system. Name the drive as well if you want.

PTM in DOS is much more powerful than in windows. And hence is how i always use it.

Hope it works

Cheers,
David

By Luke Allanson

Thanks for the help, i will run through that if my current changes dont work

Luke.

No problem. If your idea doesnt work and PTM doesnt work I am all out of suggestions....

Most problems with new drives are getting primary/slave messed up (but you have that sorted) or formatted either in the wrong file system or not at all...

Im getting a second HDD in a month or so...storage is so cheap now, and im out on my current 80Gb.

Cheers,
David

Is it auto detecting when you boot or have you set it to user. What bios do you have? Is it formatted? Real dos won't recognise anything over 2 gig anyway.There hasn't been a real dos since 6.22. Will your motherboard recognise 200gig. The questions are endless. Why not migrate to the newer hard drive and use the old one as slave?

Right click on "my computer" choose manage. in disk manager you will see the disk listed you can the right click on it and, partition it, asign a drive letter etc. any probs u2u me

if your still having problems ring me at the shop, im there on saturdays too

with win2k you have to 'write a signature' to new disks before they can be used/formatted.

as Simon H says go into the management console through 'My computer' and select disk management.... now ensure that you can see the new drive there (if not then let us know coz it's a different problem)

you need to right click on the grey box to the left of the drive and select something like 'add signature/convert to dynamic disks' (you only want the signature dynamic disks are crap)

Once you have successfully applied the signature you can right click on the drive and create a primary partition and then you can right click again and format it.

HTH

* take out primary disk
* make secondary disk primary
* reboot machine via windows 2000 / XP cd
* go through installation, quiting after you have partitioned the disk (NTFS)
* put disk back to secondary
* put back original primary disk

quote:

---

Originally posted by simonH
Right click on "my computer" choose manage. in disk manager you will see the disk listed you can the right click on it and, partition it, asign a drive letter etc. any probs u2u me

---

I use a hardware RAID card to do this sort of thing on my home pc -- make a mirror pair then break the pairing -- instant no fdisking.
The size of the partition can then be adjusted using Partition Magic or Paragon Partition Manager.

Another way is to use a Mandrake Linux boot CD -- it has a particularly good partition tool -- Diskdrake

Dad speaking (Mark)

All sorted now, we removed the primary (2Kpro NTFS), plugged in the new (200gig), formatted it under DOS (95 startup disk), plugged back in with the master (under cable select) and it showed up in my computer.

thanks for all you help

Mark

which means its been formatted as fat 32
not that it really matters though

SimonH and ChrisW have got it right. I build and install these buggers for a living and that is the way it's done.

Mark, out of interest, what is the size of the formatted HDD? and what is the file format (FAT32 or NTFS)?