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General discussion

Windows Won't format new slave drive

by SteveH01762 Jan 8, 2004 12:09AM PST

Hi Guys,
I recently bought a new hard disk and installed it as my master without any problems, however I wanted to install the old one as the slave.

Windows and the BIOS recognises the hard disk and size perfectly, but as it contains all my old system files I want to format it. When I tried to do this the format process seems to complete but an error message appears saying it wasn't able to complete the process! I'm now locked out of the drive, when I try and access it in Windows Explorer it says the drive needs to be formated which leads to the same problem!

I have the jumpers set to slave mode, and as far as I'm aware the actual physical installation is ok. When I first installed the slave drive I was able to access the information on it and back it up to the master. If anyone knows how to fix the problem I'd appreicate the help a lot!

Thanks in advance

Kind Regards
STEVE

1800XP+ AMD
256MB RAM
Master Drive - Samsung SP0612N 60Gb
Slave Drive - Samsung Sp4002H 39Gb
Windows XP

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Re:Windows Won't format new slave drive

by Cursorcowboy Jan 8, 2004 1:11AM PST

"XP - Drives and Partitions."

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Re:Windows Won't format/try fdisk maybe

by Steven Haninger Jan 8, 2004 5:08AM PST

I can't know why XP won't do the format unless it thinks there are some protected areas. XP will let you make a boot disk that's basically ME or you can round up a Win 98 startup disk and just delete the partition using fdisk. If your HD was previously XP with NTFS structure you will need to delete what's called a Non-DOS partition. Once done, you should be able to restart XP. It will see the drive using the disk manager utility and, from here, you can partition and reformat the drive.

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