40gb Hard Drive Help

Comp625

Golden Member
Aug 25, 2000
1,216
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Hey guys,

I have 2 WD 40gbs installed. The primary drive works perfectly (I'm running XP on it). But the 2nd WD40 is really screwed up.

Here's how I fooked it up:

A month ago (when I first installed XP), XP somehow crashed during a large file transfer in which i was transfering a huge 600mb folder from 1 folder to another. It crashed while I was transfering the file and when I tried to boot back into XP, it wouldn't let me. There was an error message like "NTDSK not detected. Please reboot" (or something along those lines). I could NOT boot into my WinXP cd (at the time, I didn't realize I could run the XP setup through DOS).

So I tried to format the drive using FDISK. I messed around with the drive in FDISK. At the time, the drive was divided into 2 partitions (20gb each). I converted 1 partition into FAT32 (even though NOW I know that once you switch to NTFS, you can't go back to FAT32). Eventually, I tried to install Win98SE on that drive again. In the 98SE installation process, it could not install the drive. Around 50% or so, Win98SE would say that it could not read a section of the hard drive and if I would like to Retry, Abort, Ignore, Cancel. None of which let me bypass that part of the 98SE setup.

I ended up buying another WD 40gb drive. Right now, the new drive is working properly. So I tried to install the old 40gb drive into my system as a Slave connected to the same IDE controller as my new 40gb hard drive.

I have used Partition Magic 7 to convert (to NTFS), merge and format the old 40gb drive. The drive is being detected properly BUT I cannot transfer a large chunk of data from my new drive to the old one without the old drive locking up causing WinXP to freeze. I have ran Scandisk to check for errors and nothing has popped up. But in Partition Magic, something funny and odd showed up.

Partition Magic screencap

How come my old drive has the Unallocated and Extended sections present? My first drive (which is working properly) does not have those 2 sections. Something else to note: Even after multiple formats, the "Used Space" in the D: drive still shows as 90mb. My Hard drive knowledge is not too great though I do know about Low Level Formatting and might take that route as a last step before throwing out the drive. I'd prefer a less tame solution though. So can anyone help? :)

Thanks in advance.
 

Willoughbyva

Diamond Member
Sep 26, 2001
3,267
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Delete all the partitions and create one primary partition. Windows 98 needs the first primary partition partition large enough to install on. That is probably why you get that message. There are ways around this, but normally speaking....

Since you have partition magic I would use it to create 2-20gig primary partitions. If you use ms dos fdisk it will create a primary and a logical/extended.



"Fdisk" is used to create/delete/set active partitions. Format is used to format the drive after you have created them.
 

Comp625

Golden Member
Aug 25, 2000
1,216
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0
Ok I did that. I now have 1 Primary Partition for each physical drive. I have 2 physical drives, so that amounts to 2 total primary partitions. I do not have any logical partitions. However, the drive still cannot properly store data.

I transfered a 400mb folder from my working drive over to the old drive and about halfway through the transfer progress, the transfer bar would stop. I would hear some thrashing noise within my hard drive (for about a second). And then WinXP would still lock up forcing me to reboot.

Any suggestions?