OT how do you get XP to fdisk a hard drive?

wazzzzzzzzup · Post by **wazzzzzzzzup** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 5:56 am

its been so long since i have needed to fdisk a drive.

did it alot back in the 98 days building systems.
i have a 120GB drive that XP sees in device manager as operating properly, but its not XP formatted (might be mac i dont remember)
and it doesnt come up under windows explorer.

thanks

wazz

RESCUE161 · Post by **RESCUE161** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:06 am

Can you see it in My Computer?

wazzzzzzzzup · Post by **wazzzzzzzzup** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:12 am

nope.

i see it in add new hardware, and when clicked it says device installed properly. i see it in general device manager with no problems, but going into the tabs under volumes for this drive it says
disk type - unknown, partition - not applicable, status - unreadable

RESCUE161 · Post by **RESCUE161** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:16 am

Are the jumpers in the right area?

Have you tried just plugging it in by iteslf? I've had to do that before just so I could format & fdisk it. Once I did that, I was able to put it in with the other drive and use it in XP.

wazzzzzzzzup · Post by **wazzzzzzzzup** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:46 am

its jumpered as a slave, on a cable by itself.

kd5wyu · Post by **kd5wyu** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 7:45 am

wazzzzzzzzup wrote:its jumpered as a slave, on a cable by itself.

Stop right there.

If it is on an IDE cable by itself, it needs to be
-on the end of the cable
-jumpered as master or cable select

To format it once you have the system recognizing it, open Computer Management and go to Disk Management.

You should then see the disk there as 120 GB unformatted. Then you can right click on the empty space on that disk's bargraph and choose Format. It'll take a bit, then Windows will assign it a drive letter and you'll have more space to play with.

thebigphish · Post by **thebigphish** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 7:49 am

whoa whoa whoa....

two ways to do this.

1) you can use the computer management part of the microsoft management console (MMC) which is a GUI way of formatting it (START - ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS - COMPUTER MANAGEMENT)

OR....

2) you can use 'old reliable'. Launch a command shell, type in "diskpart" and use the command line method of doing it...rather similar to diskpart (and *nix's fdisk)

just because you have a drive that shows up in my computer, doesnt' mean you can format it with XP.

Once you get the drive partitioned with 'diskpart' - you need to assign it a drive letter, and then format it. I prefer to do the first two from the command line....for some reason, the MMC still hasn't impressed me yet...although it makes reassigning drive letters rather easy.

wazzzzzzzzup · Post by **wazzzzzzzzup** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 5:36 pm

ok guys, thanks,

administrative trools fixed the problem

wazz