USB Hard Drive format

[mwidner]

Dummy me... I bought an 80Gb drive for my laptop. Wanting to use Ghost or some such to copy an image of my current 20Gb drive, I took the old drive out of the laptop, put in the new one and loaded Win2000 onto it. Then, when I was unable to create 16 CD's to copy the image, I got an enclosure for the 80Gb drive and attached it as USB. The I simply tried to "delete" all the files on the 80gb drive. Now all I get is a Code 10 error and it can't start the device. If I try to put it back as the main drive and load Win2K again, it doesn't even see the drive anymore. Trying to boot from it, it says no operating system.

I feel a bit stupid about this since I kept digging my hole deeper. Is there any way of formatting the 80gb drive? I want to replace the 20gb with the 80 and put the 20 into the enclose as a USB drive AFTER I copy an image to the 80gb.

Sorry to be vague. Any and all help is appreciated...

 

[diogenes10]

First, Ive not worked either with windows 2000 or with harddrives of the size you have, so please take these as comments for consideration, but not to be acted upon without some additional evaluation/confirmation etc.

Just reading your post above, because of the trouble you're having and several threads in the data recovery forum about trying to recover data overwritten by a ghost image of another drive, makes me very nervous about your data. I am perhaps overly cautious, but I would probably be studying ghost and drive image procedures for creating an image scanning multiple cds and trying to get an image of that 20gb drive on cd before i did anything else so I would be covered in case of problems in the transfer/setup process.

With windows 98, the older versions of ghost and drive image that I have boot to a dos prompt. If that would be the case with windows 2000 and its appropriate versions of ghost or drive image, then a possibility might be to put both drives in a desktop, boot to a dos prompt then put in the norton or drive image diskettes, run the image programs and then move the 80 back to the laptop.

Before you press the last button on the image process be very, very, very careful you're going the right way. "Dummy me" is nothing compared to the feelings you'll have about your computing skills if you overwrite all your 20g data with a blank 80g image. (Of course recovery from that is one of the reasons you have the cd based backup suggested earlier.)

Good luck.

"The best optimizer is between your ears."
M. Abrash

 

[mwidner]

Thanks for your post. I appreciate your thoughts. However, I haven't deleted anything from the 20gb drive and I only intend to image it to the 80gb dirve.

My problem is trying to even see the 80gb drive now. I need to format it and then I'll start to worry about the image part.

Thanks again for your suggestions. I appreciate any and all help.

 

[diogenes10]

A win98 approach would be to try putting it in the desktop, booting with a win98 bootdisk, fdisking and then formatting.

I dont know if the same approach works for win2k. win2k boot disks available here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

"The best optimizer is between your ears."
M. Abrash

 

[SYAR2003]

Only way i could format/partition my maxtor 160GB ext. usb drive was with partition magic .
From within windows 2000 and disk managment it stalled with an error .