Help needed with 2nd hard drive......

Hey guys...

I am hoping some one here can help with this..... I just installed a 2nd hard drive in my system. The drive is a WD 40gb, here is were the problem lies.... For some reason my system only reads it as a 6 gb. I am running XP. How do I get it to read the entire drive as one 40gb partition?? A friend suggested using partition magic but I really don't wanna drop $50 on a program that may or may not work. Are there any free programs that could help me with this?

 

How about right clicking on the drive then format and do a re-format? Make sure the file system is NTFS... You can check "Quick format" too.... If that doesnt work try it again and uncheck the "Quick format" so it does a full format...

 

Yeah..... I tried that but still no luck...

Any other ideas??

I tried something called Partition Doctor to check the drive and it shows the full 40gb but still on 6 gb are recognized by XP. Someone else told me to fdisk it but I must admit that I am not to handy when it comes to DOS. Would anyone know the step to format it that way???

 

Hmmm... You shoulnt need to use fdisk... Is the drive connected to any other drive inside the computer?
How old is your computer or your motherboard in your computer, i take it they should be ok as your running winxp....
Maybe try and download WD tools from their website and let those tools format it, you could even try a low level format?...

*Edit

Try this link to download the tool for WD for windows...

http://support.wdc.com/download/?cxml=n&pid=3&swid=3

It will detect your drive, you can run a diagnostic on it, do a quick check, or select "write zero's" that is the low level format....

 

The drive is working as the slave to my other hard drive..

The system is an compaq s6200cl... Athlon 2800 system with an ASUS board (only original parts from this system are the MB, CPU, and Hard drive everything else has been upgraded.... ).

I haven't thought about downloading any tools from WD yet ..so I will give it a shot. What eactly is a low level format??

By the way thanks for all your help so far.....

 

Great I will try that as soon as I get home! I am stuck at work right now. but I will post whatever results I get. Thanks!!

 

i can't seem to access the WDC website?? are you guys having the same problem??

 

ok here is the latest.... the drive is ok but it is not showing up in "my computer" under hard drives ...but I do show 2 drives one is my c:, the other is showing as a 6 gb but it is not a physical drive. prior to installing the new drive I only showed one drive...it seems like this a partition to my c: drive.

Now my new drive is listed in my device manager and apears to be working fine...but I have no way to access it??? it does not have a letter assigned to it. I can run test on it at it seems ok but it is not active for some reason. Sorry if this sounds confusing but its got me going in circles.

 

upon further review...drive d is a partition of my main hard drive.
When I installed the 2nd hard drive this is the drive that appeared...wierd?? the 2nd HD for some reason won't show up as an available drive. I can run test on it and it shows up in my device manager but it doesn't have a letter assign to it so that I ma access it.

Do i need to remove the drive D: partition?? and how would I do that??

 

Don't touch that D partition, since you don't know what it is! If it shows up in My Computer, it is probably a partition of your main hard drive.

The reason that your drive does not show up in My Computer, and has no drive letter is, you haven't partitioned and formatted it. Do the following, if you haven't done it already: (Steps 1-4 are the long way to get to Disk Management)

1. Click on My computer.
2. Click on Control Panel.
3. Click on Administrative Tools.
4. Click on Computer Management.
5. Under Storage, click on Disk Management.

In the window that comes up, you should see what hard drives (and their partitions) are in your computer. The top portion of the window will show all of the partitions of your hard drives. The bottom portion of the window will show you what partitions are associated with each particular hard drive.

To the left of the top row, in the lower portion of the window, you should see the words Disc 0. The first box to the right of that, should be your C: drive, and it should show Healthy (System) below the size and type of format of the C drive. This is your system drive. Don't do anything with it.

Below the Disk 0 box, you should see a Disk 1 box. This is the drive that you just installed. To the right of that, it should say something like unallocated drive space. Right click on that uallocated drive space box, and select Format. I forget what options come up, but I think you can make partitions at that point, but for sure, click on Format, and format it as NTFS.

Let us know if it works for you.

BTW, the boxes that you see below the Disk 0 and Disk 1 are your DVD/CD burners and your floppy drive, if you have one, or your zip drive. I have no idea if virtual drives created by Alcohol or Daemon Tools show here, because I have never loaded a virtual drive.

 

Do what GranpaBW said... I would have said that but thought your 40Gb was their and just showing 6Gb!

So the 6Gb D:/ Drive is a partition of your C:/ Drive... : )

 

Thanks guys that worked!! I was gettin pretty fustrated there!!
My personal thanks to GrandpaBW, Rosco404, and ddp.

I do have one more question though..why the heck did that partition appear??.. I never made it. Can I get rid of it??

 

NO! DO NOT DELETE IT!

Compaq, HP, and Dell have decided that it would be a great idea to encrypt the OEM OS and install it into a partition on the drive. When you load your OEM disc, this disc simply unlocks the encryption on that partition, allowing your computer to load a fresh copy of the OS. I'm not sure exactly when they thought that would be a good idea, so it's entirely possible that this is what is on your drive. Also, your OEM OS could have installed it's operating directory into this partition as well.

I recently tried to install a retail version of XP Pro onto a Compaq, and the system rejected the new operating system. Compaq (especially lower end models) have become so proprietary that the retail version wasn't supported.

 

No problem glad you got it sorted : )

 

Thanks again ....but I had already formatted it thinking it was my 2nd hard drive. The good news is that it had no ill effect on my system.
Since it is blank now can I remove the partition or should I leave well enough alone and live with a 6gb partition?