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General discussion

Hard Drive Recognition

Feb 22, 2004 5:57PM PST

I have installed a new HDD onto a PC using XP pro.
I removed the old HDD and put it into my lower grade PC running 98SE. The bios recognises the HDD but the OS dosen't. Got a format system disc but the drive is not recognised in DOS either. Fdisk dosn't find it either. I presume that this is because the HDD is NTFS rather than FAT32. What is the best way of formating the HDD for use on my 98SE PC. Any advise will be gratefully appreciated. Thank You.

Discussion is locked

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Re:Hard Drive Recognition
Feb 22, 2004 8:17PM PST

Powerquest partition magic should convert from NTFS back to Fat 32 (and vice versa) but obviously you need to get the HDD recognised so maybe put it back in your old PC? Of course you could have kept the two HDD on the same PC.

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Re:Re:Hard Drive Recognition
Feb 22, 2004 9:12PM PST

Thanks for that. The idea was not waste a HDD as I have just installed a second HDD on the XP PC so it now has 2 120gig. The old one is 40gig and I wanted to utilise it rather than discard it.

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Re:Hard Drive Recognition
Feb 22, 2004 8:40PM PST

"What is the best way of formating the HDD for use on my 98SE PC."

I don't know what would be best for you, but I could use the POWER TOOL called DELPART.EXE to delete the NTFS partition on that drive, then I would use FDISK and FORMAT commands to set it up as always for Windows 98 usage.

I can find DELPART.EXE at http://www.bootdisk.com

Bob

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Re:Re:Hard Drive Recognition
Feb 22, 2004 9:17PM PST

Thanks. I presume that the HDD will have to go back into the XP PC for me to delete the partion. Then I can follow the usaul path of Fdisk & Format after replacing it in the 98SE PC.

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Delpart.exe can work from DOS.
Feb 22, 2004 9:38PM PST

"I presume that the HDD will have to go back into the XP PC for me to delete the partion."

If you wish, but I use DELPART.EXE to save the risk of all that.

"Then I can follow the usaul path of Fdisk & Format after replacing it in the 98SE PC."

Yes.

Bob

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Re:Hard Drive Recognition
Feb 23, 2004 11:02PM PST

You can still use fdisk to delete the NTFS partition. It is a "non DOS" partition you wish to delete, look for that option in your fdisk menu. You then can create a DOS partition and format the hard drive for use in your older PC