Wetsern Digital Hard Drive Hates My Computer

[MylesAnthony]

Ok so... I bought a WD HD that is 160 gigs over the holidays for 30 bucks, brand new. I also bought an Emachines PC with an 80 gig hd in it already. I went to add the 160 gig as the slave and it had real issues. Eventually I got it partitioned and such and then everytime I would save something to it and turn it off for the night when I'd reboot the hd wouldn't be recognized and it said it was full. Well now windows (I'm using Windows XP) decided it'd just randomly partition it without asking me... it partitioned it to 31.4 gigs. I'm not happy... I tried to repartition in Data Lifeguard, the software that came with the HD and it says "The drive that is currently selected for setup is not being translated correctly by your system. The drive may contain a DDO that the operating system does not work with properly. To correctly setup this drive, you must 1st run Data Lifeguard for DOS & remove the DDO from the drive."
Now I'm out of my league. I have no idea what i'm doing anymore... any suggestions? Help? Thanks.

 

[micker377]

Boot your computer with a Win 98 boot disk. Run "FDisk" and see if you have any hidden partitions that XP doesn't see. Delete ALL partitions. Repartition and format as one big partition. Reboot normally, and have XP set it up as you want. Make sure the IDE cable is good.

 

[micker377]

Forgot, use the WD diagnostic to check the drive before you put any data on it.

 

[MylesAnthony]

What if I don't own a Win98 disk? Thanks for your advice.

-Myles Anthony

 

[garebo]

Its very easy to make one, you can go to bootdisk.com and download a win 98 boot disk.

Also, the western digital diagnostics can write zeroes to the hard drive before you fdisk and format it. That should take care of any problems for sure.
I dont want to go against what micker377 is saying, and, in fact i am not, i am only adding another step is all.

so:
download a win98 boot disk from bootdisk.com and put it on a floppy and put in in your floppy drive.
Boot to your bios and set floppy as first boot and then save and exit and you should boot to dos.
Once there take out win 9 floppy boot disk and put in west dig diagnostics floppy disk and go to the line that mentions writing zeros to your hard drive and press enter.
That will take a while to do.
When done reboot with win98 floppy and when you get to dos you type fdisk and say Y for yes when asked about a large h drive.
When in fdisk you partition the drive and make it active.
Then you have to reboot and go to dos again and type format and press enter and you will be asked if you want to format and you press yes or y.
Then you can install the h drive in your system, boot up and change boot order so cdrom is first. Have win xp cd in the cdrom and boot up. Win xp will ask if you want to format NTFS and you say yes, also i wouldnt do a quick format, i would do a full one.






Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[Freestone]

Review this site to ensure your hardware and software meet requirements for drives greater than 137GB:

http://www.48bitlba.com/

http://www.48bitlba.com/winxp.htm