6 replies to this topic

[GDOGG]

Ive got 2 hard dirves one with XP pro and the other used to have XP on it, but since Ive changed drives around and removed the operating sys from the second drive it keeps saying that that drive is not formated but it has about 30 gigs of music and about 5 gigs of movies. And when i had a look at formating it, it tells me that its 790GB when its only 120GB. any clues??

[zorfox]

I am using the assumption you have master/slave jumpers set correctly and are not using cable select. I also assume your bios is reporting the correct size drive. If you have not checked this do so. If you have check again to be sure.

If you install sp2 for XP then I hope you followed the directions by the letter. It can reak havock on your system if not.

If all looks good up to this point then I would try using a partition manager. There is a pretty good one here, http://www.ranish.com/part/ , called Partition Manager. It has been in beta a long time but DON'T let that steer you away. It does things Partition Magic can't.

This should give you a good indication if your partitions have been corrupted. If so this app has some utilities to corect them as well.

Sorry for the lack of help but without knowing the above first it is hard to track down the problem. Even experts jumper wrong or set the bios to user with wrong settings. Then spend hours trying to figure it out until they realize the obvious is staring them in the face take it from me, I've done it.

Good luck!

[zorfox]

Whoops, sorry forgot to mention Partition Manager is free for non-commercial use. Sorry for the extra post

[GDOGG]

no ii am using cable select for the second drive, whats wrong with that, and when I statrt the sysytem up at the first screen when detecting IDE drtive my seagate 120gb is just a bunch of strange letters. will check the bios soon just gota go to work.

[zorfox]

Sounds like you are trying to use a standard 40 wire IDE ribbon cable and setting your drives with cable select. With only one drive you may have been able to do this depending on which connector it was on. However now with 2 drives it does not see the second correctly. Cable selet was an early idea that never caught on. Great in theory but if you do not have a special cable, which most PCs don't, the jumper configuration won't work. Here is basically how a special cable and the jumper settings work if you care... Master: The device that is attached to the "master connector" sees the CSEL signal as grounded, because its connector has pin #28 attached to the cable, and the host's connector has that signal grounded. Seeing the "zero value" (grounded), the device sets itself to operate as master (device 0). Slave: The drive that is attached to the "slave connector" does not see the CSEL signal as grounded, because its connector is not attached to the CSEL signal on the cable. Seeing this "no connection", the device configures itself as a slave (device 1). So as you can see you need a special cable to use that jumper configuration. If you are SURE you do swap the 2 drive's connectors. However I bet you have a standard IDE cable 40 or 80 (round usually) wire. In that case set your boot drive jumper to master and your slave (your old drive) to slave. Make sure your bios is set correctly. Try to just set all of them to auto first. That should work unless you have a pretty old PC. If no luck set each drive manually based on each drives cylinders, heads, and sectors. If you need to, look your drives up on the net for the correct bios settings because you will also have to set landing zone and precomps too. If none of that works the only thing left is using a drive overlay (yuck) which I doubt you need if your PC saw a 120 gig drive. That tells me if you got to here we are probably barking up the wrong tree. But if when you boot your first boot screen does not see the drive correctly STOP right there. It is hardware and nothing to do with any of you software. Good luck! I think this will work for you

[wng_z3r0]

If that doesnt work, I think I can whip up a few suggestions wng

[GDOGG]

solved ... ijust reformatted the badboy