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General discussion

need to remove operating system

by aqw8326 Feb 13, 2006 9:14AM PST

I made a mess, needing to do some upgraging on my home built computer, I attempted to upgrade from ME to XP. Problem is I have two hard drives,- the master did not have enough room, so it sent to the slave, now I have two OS running. I want to reformat my two Maxtors, wipe them clean and start over with the larger as the master, smaller/slave,
Can't seem to get the Max Blast to work. Any suggestions?
Ann

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4 Posts
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Use the XP CD. . .
by Coryphaeus Feb 13, 2006 9:40AM PST

to format and clean the drive you want as slave. Set it as slave on the system board. Set the other drive as master and use the XP to format it and install the system.

Before you start, to be safe, remove the slave drive from the PC and install XP on the master. After it's up and running, connect the slave drive, let XP find it, then activate it.

Wayne

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If MaxBlast is a
by Ray Harinec Feb 13, 2006 10:52AM PST

overlay program, Windows will not recognize it for formatting etc. You may have to remove the Maxblast overlay first.

You may find the best think to do is clean the drives using "killdisk" or "delpart". These will remove overlay or other type formats.

Here's a link to delpart on Toni H's website.

http://www.pcwarfare.com/hdd.tools.htm

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Think about
by skippyd333 Feb 13, 2006 3:55PM PST

using cable select option on your jumper selection instead of master/slave jumpers. If you have yhe right ribbon cable to do it with. Must be a 80 conducter cable. It looks like this. The ridges across the cable is almost smooth instead of rough. The motherboard end is blue, center grey and other end black. Then it has to have 1 hole closed where they connect to the hard drive pins. Cable select auto selects master/slave. Master on the end. A 40 conductor cable (older type), the master is in the middle when using cable select Read this page it explains.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html
Now when you freshly load Xp it will come to the part where you will see both drives. I recommend deleting the formats on both drive and start out raw. Just read what is says. You want Drive c as your Xp drive. Select it and go . it will then give you the choice of how you want to format C: or hdd0. Go through the whole loading process then when you are done you can go into my computer see both drives. Right click on the second drive and choose format. I also recommend switching to ntfs format instead of fat32. It is more secure and uses less drive space. The difference in speed your talking miliseconds.

skip

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Thank you all
by aqw8326 Feb 14, 2006 11:45AM PST

Thank you all for your help, they all worked.

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