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Hard drive question

X

Xanager

Member
I just installed a Promise Ultra 133 Tx2 controller in my system. I have three hard drives, one connected to mobo, and one on each channel of the controller card. I honestly don't know exactly how this thing works. I installed all drivers though. In the device manager everything is recognized. All three hard drives and the Promise card. All are in working order too.

I thought they would just show up in "My Computer" but they aren't there. Don't I have to format them first? I really need to use these other drives now, but I just can't access them. Can someone please help??

All are Maxtor D740X, running XP, nforce mobo

thanks
 
You need to boot from dos, FDISK the drives, then FORMAT them. Easy if you have a win98 boot disk lying around or if you can create a bootdisk from winxp. If you don't have the win98 bootdisk and can't create one from xp, you can download a bootdisk:

HERE
 
You simply type in FDISK after you've booted from your floppy drive. FDISK will know that the drives are there. When you run Fdisk, there's an option to Change Drives. Just change to the new drive and partition it. After you've partitioned both drives, you'll be able to format them.
 
when I type fdisk I just get Bad command or file name. That is after A:\> I can't get it to C:\> because it says invalid drive specification. I know I suck at this stuff. I can build the stinking computer, but I can't format a hard drive...
 
Did you create or download a windows 98 boot disk? Again, if you don't have one, just d/l it from bootdisk.com.

Edit: what happened to c: Assumed you had one drive working.
 


<< I just created an MS-DOS startup disk through XP. Will a 98 bootup disk work on XP? >>



You will be able to fdisk and format the new drives in FAT32 from a win98 boot disk. You may not be able to access your c: drive if it's in ntfs.
 


<< yep, can't get any fdisk here, I've tried two separate disks, and they both say Incorrect Msdos version. bummer >>



I don't understand what you're doing - sounds like you're still booting into xp. If you boot from the floppy drive with a win98 boot disk, it will be the correct version of msdos & FDISK will work. Do you have your bios set up so that it will boot from the floppy?

You can switch from fat32 to ntfs after you have the drives set up.
 
the ms dos disk that xp makes is realy a winme disk and FDISK should work

ohh yea
you should be able to fdisk from the dos promt in windows i know you can on me/98 and its alot faster
 
okay, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I had booted with the WinXP boot disk, and then tried to use the 98 boot disk to run fdisk, so that's why there was a dos compatibility problem. I finally figured out how to do it. I'm actually formatting the disks inside of Windows XP, and that seems to be working fine. I can also choose NFTS in XP. Thanks a lot for the help, made my life a lot easier 🙂
 
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