I messed up my external hard drive

art · #1 10-03-2005, 04:35 PM

Its a long story.....
I bought an external h/d a few months ago. its a Maxtor 300gb.
From the time I first installed it I have had trouble. It took me quite a while to get XP pro to pick the h/d up,when it did the drive had 2 partitions in fat32 so I reformatted to the ntfs system. That was no trouble but I still had problems trying to get xp to pick up the drive. I checked my drivers for it and the usb2 drivers, everything was ok. Then on one boot up a few days ago the drive would not be recognized so I decided to restart the pc as I clicked the button I noticed very quickly a window open as if the pc was reading something and then an error message. I have no idea what they were as they were too quick as the pc shut down.
So after around 20 attempts to reboot hopeing the drive would be recognizzed with no luck I decided to try something. I took out my original drive from the pc and took the maxtor out of its case and put it in the comp.
Installed winxp on the drive then looked in my computer to find that the installation was on a 148gb partition, and the rest of the drive had vanished!
I looked in drive manager, that did not pick the rest of the drive up and installed partition magic which also did not pick it up.
I have my original h/d back now. Is there a program that will restore the drive to factory settings so I can install the drive internaly as a slave? I hear that there are programs to restore drives that can be written to floppy...

Thanks for any advice. It is greatly appreciated.

yoni5002 · #2 10-03-2005, 04:45 PM

Probably with your HDD 300GB came also a CD installation... If so... you can use it to restore your drive... By the way make sure your computer supports such as big HDD!!!.

Yoni5002
________

art · #3 10-03-2005, 05:27 PM

Thankyou.
How do I find out if my comp supports big drives, as I say it picked it up ok a couple of times (when it was external!). The cd I got is only for the drivers (i think)
Sorry I am not much of a tech person

yoni5002 · #4 10-03-2005, 05:40 PM

The CD you have is probably the one to fix the problem... See if it is bootable or not. If Yes, it is gonna take you to the rest of the options by itself,,, all you will need to do is to select the option you wanna perform.

Your computer needs to be set to boot from CD...
make sure your first Bootable group is the Cds Drive(s)in the Bios Setup

Yoni5002
________

snooker · #5 10-03-2005, 08:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by art

Thankyou.
How do I find out if my comp supports big drives, as I say it picked it up ok a couple of times (when it was external!). The cd I got is only for the drivers (i think)
Sorry I am not much of a tech person

Hi ... Check with your motherboard manufacturer , they should provide info as to whether it supports it or not , and if it does ? you just might need to update your bios

Just curious but what type of board do you have ?

art · #6 10-04-2005, 01:29 PM

no the cd is not bootable..

the motherboard is a Intel Havre D845HV

got the info from aida32

F A B Scott · #7 10-05-2005, 12:03 AM

Windows XP SP1 includes 48-bit LBA support for ATAPI disk drives. With this support, you can use hard disks that are larger than the current 137 GB limit. By default, support is enabled in SP1

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=303013

art · #8 10-05-2005, 01:36 PM

That is good news, I have service pack 1.

Now I need to know if I fit the hard drive as a slave in my pc will it slow the pc down? also a partition on the drive has the latter 'c' will it effect my main drive 'c' on first boot? and will I have to do anything with the bios?

I am a novice, so please forgive me if this is a stupid question.

Thankyou.

F A B Scott · #9 10-05-2005, 02:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by art

..Now I need to know if I fit the hard drive as a slave in my pc will it slow the pc down?

It shouldn't if it's been done properly.

Quote:

...also a partition on the drive has the latter 'c' will it effect my main drive 'c' on first boot?

if you have everything backed up and formatted or if the slave is new, XP should recognise it and assign a different letter. If the slave drive is the old one with stuff on it the easiest way[imo] is to copy the important bits you want and then format it.

Quote:

...and will I have to do anything with the bios?

Probably not but you could check it out to see if it's set to autodetect.

Make sure you have the jumpers on the hard drives set as master & slave and that they are plugged in at the right place on the ribbon cables
eg.slave on the centre connector and master on the end.

yoni5002 · #10 10-05-2005, 03:29 PM

That's nice Scott, I love when people help each other all the way throug out the problem... Very kind of you

Yoni5002
________

F A B Scott · #11 10-05-2005, 06:47 PM

he he -thanks, we aim to please.

art · #12 10-06-2005, 01:25 PM

ok, I checked the jumper on the back of the h/d and corrected it. fit the h/d in the pc and booted. Got a black screen saying boot failed, so I went into the bios and found the boot order was not correct. Changed the order and tried again. Perfect! the drive is fully recognised and I now have a smooth running system....
Thanks to you guys I found the confidence to fit this drive as a slave and the knowledge on how to do it..

THANKYOU ALL !!

F A B Scott · #13 10-06-2005, 04:25 PM

Great news, thanks for letting us know.