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I recently got a 200GB Western Digital hard drive. I want it to be the 2nd hard drive on my PC. I got it off eBay. Typically, drives from eBay are wiped clean. Anyway, my BIOS "sees" the WD drive, the XP Device Manager "sees", but I don't see any partition in Windows Explorer.
What do I have to do to be able to use this drive? Also, the BIOS only sees this drive as approximately a 65GB drive. Anything I can do about that? (This is replacing a 100GB Maxtor drive which died. The BIOS could see all 100GB of it).
Thanks.
UPDATE - OK, I am able to "see" the drive in Windows Explorer, but I still have some questions. I can dual boot this PC, as W98 or XP. I booted W98. It has PartitionMagic. PM could see the drive even though there was no partition on it. I use PM to create a partition. But, what if I did have PM? Shouldn't I have been able to put a partition on that drive in XP? How would I do that? PM saw the drive as approximately a 130GB drive. So, I still have the question, "Anything I can do to see all 200GB the drive has?"
Last edited by rlambert7; 23rd September 2007 at 00:46.
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Chances are that the hard drive has already been partitioned and that any formatting has been removed. XP can tell that the physical drive is there but can't read or write any files to it.
Here's the easy free XP built-in way to partition and format a new hard drive:
Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc
You will see a window pop up called Disk Management. It shows all the volumes/partitions on you hard drives and optical drives. You should see your new drive there in the row named "Disk 1". Each row is a physical drive. Each physical hard drive can be divided up into partition/volumes that will be named D;, E;, F;, etc. if you wish. If you want the drive to be one huge partition then the physical drive will have only a single partition (and drive letter) associated with it.
I suspect there is one 65GB partition already on it, but it hasn't been formatted yet. The rest of the storage on the drive is probably "free space", that is, hasn't been allocated to any partitions yet.
I couldn't find any decent tutorials on how to use DISKMGMT.MSC. Basically, you right-click on the bar of the physical drive that you want to partition and/or format. The total length of the bar represents the entire storage capacity of the physical drive. On free space you can choose to create a new partition using any or all of the free space available. You have to select a type of partition to make it. Stick with Primary partitions.
On existing partitions you can either delete them or format them. You can choose the either to format a partition with the NTFS file system or FAT32. NTFS partitions less error-prone, but there are some specific circumstances when a FAT32 partition is desirable.
DISKMGMT.MSC has a good Help section - Read it!
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Today, September 22, 2007 only, Partition Manager 8.0 is being offered absolute free. It is very similar to DISKMGMT.MSC, but has more options and may be slightly easier to use:
Thanks everyone for your replies. I think I can make use of all of that info, but I think, ultimately, my problem is one of the disk drive controller's inability to address beyond [approximately] 127 GB.
I have 3 other PCs. I noticed in the device manager of one of them that there is an "ULTRA" controller, so I removed the 200 GB disk from the PC in which I had originally installed it, and put it in the other PC, and, from the DISK MANAGEMENT utility, I can see the 127 GB partition I created on the first PC, and that there are 58+ GBs still unallocated.
The problem is that I can't physically install the 200GB hard drive in this other PC very easily*. I'd, at the very least have to make a custom IDE cable (one where the middle connnector was much closer to the motherboard end of the cable than you typically find them). So, for now, I purchased a PCI card ULTRA controller off eBay, and will put the 200GB drive back in the original PC once I receive it.
*Right now I just have the two hard drives lying ackwardly in the PC (it looks like it fell off a truck). Just did that to confirm my suspicion that I would be able to see all of the available space on the hard drive.
So, I still have the question, "Anything I can do to see all 200GB the drive has?"
I suspect you do not have SP1 or 2 installed ...
Quote:
The only current Windows operating systems that natively support the full capacity of ATA drives
larger than 137GB are:
Windows XP Home Service Pack 1 (SP1) or higher
Windows XP Professional SP1 or higher
Windows 2000 Professional SP3 or higher
Windows 2000 Server SP3 or higher
sounds confusing
i am assuming that the jumpers are on correctly as the drive is seen
I know with win 2000 there is some problem with seeing maximum drive sizes
Windows 98 can handle fairly large drives
The only thing that i can warn you is that the largest partition you want to go to with fat32 ( win 98 as you know cannot see ntsf) is 120 gig
I am told that even by splitting large drives with fat 32 formats, into smaller partitions below that 120 that larger drives have real trouble with the new larger drives
You think you get away with it and then after a month the drive goes down and data is lost
As a later step with your computer you might want to update the bios of your computer
I would not do this as an initial step however
