Installing Slave Hard Drive

I'm confused.

First My System:

Amptron 3726(m)t 400mhz with 384MB RAM
WD 6GB hard drive installed on Secondary as master
Phillips DVD/CD-RW installed as slave
Works fine.


IT friend at work gave me a Western Digital WD200BB 20GB hard drive they were just going to trash.

Moved Hard Drive and CD to Primary.

Removed the CD, set it as slave, installed it. System booted fine. Wanted to format the drive to get rid of all the trash on it but "format" said it was only 9GB. Looked at properties, volume and it said 9XX GB unallocated space.

Since I couldn't format the full 20GB, I installed my toshiba CDR on Seconday and jumped it as master, booted system, couldn't find hard drives, F1 to continue, etc. All proper setting in CMOS done, CMOS saw all installed hardware.

Removed CD booted again, couldn't find hard drives

Put system back to the way it was, works fine.

It appears, anytime I try to attach something to the Secondary the system has a problem with that.

I don't know what I am doing wrong.

1. How do I get the full 20GB out of this drive?

2. How do I resolve the probem with putting something on the secondary?

Any advice appreciated.

Mitch

 

Update

Ok, sat back and thought about it.

Connected the 20GB drive with the CD-ROM. Booted to XP Home Disk. It errored looking for previous version of windows.

Finally got the 20GB drive connected as slave to 6GB drive. Have both the CD-ROM and DVD/CD-RW connected to secondary. All is well at this point.

Now I just need to get the full capacity out of this 20GB Hard Drive. I formated the 9.31GB is said was available to get rid of all the Windows 98 stuff that was on it.

So, Now I have a 6GB Hard Drive and a 20GB Hard Drive with only 10GB that I can see.

Advice Please

Mitch

 

I should have waited for your instructions. It would have been easier. I finally booted to my XP CD and deleted the partition on the drive and then created a partition in the unpartitioned space. Then rebooted and formatted the drive. It seems to be ok now.

Thats what I get for trying to do something technical on only three hours sleep in the past 36.

Thanks for the reply, though. and I will remember "diskmgmt.msc" in the future.

Thanks again.

Mitch

 

Mitchell,
I would be very cautious of a MoBo of that genre recognising a 20Gb HDD.
I had an old AMD 500 that happily handled a 40Gb HDD - but would only recognise 10Gb. It worked fine until files started to 'drift' into the other '30Gb pond'.

The thing that twigged for me was that one of the first files to do so was the PCI Modem driver.
Just be aware.

Den

 

Thanks for the heads up. Will be using this drive mostly for data storage. I have a teenage daughter who likes to download music via BearShare. She had 1.5GB of my 6GB hard drive used up in music alone. Although I need a little space for myself, she can now have her music without the "low virtual memory" warnings or the comments from me about deleting some songs to free up space. What can I do? She's a teenager, she's my daughter, I want her to be happy. All I need is Corel Draw, the internet, and email. She can have the rest.

Will definately keep an eye on the drive....

 

Mitchell:

I'm not meaning to rain on your parade but you would be well advised to do a little reading about Bearshare, Limewire and other P2P file sharing. Its about as close as one gets to throwing out the red carpet for malware. A very high (scary) percentage of those files are going to create problems. Unfortunately, some of that "free" music or whatever, could cost plenty.

 

Thanks for the warning. I was quite worried about the P2P programs and found BearShare was the least problematic. I have AVG, SpyBot S&D, and my Sygate Firewall resident. I scan with AVG daily, SpyBot - weekly, and Adaware weekly. I also have the added protection (I think) of my Vonage router. I wish I could afford to pay for sites like Napster, but my daughter downloads a lot of songs big $$$$$. I have already told my daughter BearShare will disappear the first time I find a bad file... But I would rather have one site to worry about than the enormous list of "free MP3" sites on the Internet.

Thanks again, your heads up is well heeded. At least BearShare blocks any song marked copyrighted.

Mitch