Hard Drive Hilarities

[PowerHour]

Hi guys, I just bought a 40gb WD hard disk today and I installed it as prescribed in Maximum PC mag(yay for learning how to do this wacky computer stuff myself).

There is one problem though. The drive is recognized by the BIOS as primary slave drive, however, it gets no recognition in windows. When I do Compmgmt.msc and go to the disk management window, I see my master hd showing up normally, the slave drive shows up but says Unallocated.

I cannot assign a drive name, cannot format, cannot create partition. I have connected and re connected the drive jumpers etc... but it doesn't change.

OS is win2kpro.

any help is appreciated and will get you into the good graces of the Puppy God.

Later.

 

[canadian_divx]

ok simple fix that i had problems with too, you need the data lifeguard tool from WD's site. in there downloads section it goes on to a floppy and then u reboot and just follow instructions, read the read me file when u download that program and all will be good

 

[canadian_divx]

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

 

[canadian_divx]

http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/dlginstall_10_0.exe

 

[canadian_divx]

i got bored so there is the prog just wun it in windows and it will creat a floppy

 

[PowerHour]

+5 on your puppy god karma scale, but sadly, I do not have a 3.5" drive.

Got anything else for me?

 

[canadian_divx]

well umm other than finding a way to burn it to cd, and i dont know how. you can go to work or a friends and do it there and bring the thing home unless, if you have partition magic you MIGHT be able to do it with that but i dont know. never done it before like that

 

[Taurus]

Originally posted by PowerHour
name, cannot format, cannot create partition.

what happens when you try to format, partition, etc? do you get an error message or what?

 

[Zedric]

If it's unallocated you should just create a partition and format it....

I'm as curious as taurus to hear any error messages.

 

[PowerHour]

When I'm in the window I described before and I right click on the drive, it comes up with 3 options, create partition, prpoperties, help. And create partition is in grey. Cannot click it

there is no error message or anything, it just doesn't let me do it.

 

[canadian_divx]

my idea would be to pull it is a pc that has a flopy drive and do it there
and then bring it back to host pc

 

[PowerHour]

Yeah I had that idea to. Thanks for the links and stuff divx, much appreciated

 

[jonifen]

I think the drive needs initialising before partitioning and formatting...

 

[PowerHour]

And how do I do that please?