Why won't this drive format

[JeffCos]

I just installed this drive and the BIOS and OS recognize the drive, but when I try to format it Windows tells me that it is unable to format the drive. I tried to format it in NTFS. Does it need to be a FAT?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Are your jumpers set correctly on both drives? NTFS should work.

 

[JeffCos]

yes, my 80GB western digital is set as the master, it's the only drive i've had for the last 3 years. And the Seagate is set as a slave.

 

[Luke Friendly]

Try setting them both to cable select, but keep them in the same order (80gb W.D. at the end of the cable, Seagate in the middle) this way the bios will automaticaly set them as primary /secondary and will choose the correct mode to run them in, this all depends on the age of your mobo, older motherboards sometimes have problems recognizing newer bigger H.D.'s, if thats the case I think abios flash is your only option (dont quote me on that though) in that case take it to a pro, let them bear the consequences of making a mistake, and I'm sure was a given but what kind of IDE cables are you runnig, make sure they are 80-pin and depending on the specs for the seagate, might want to think about getting ATA 100/133's there only a couple dollars, either way FAT\NTFS is not your problem, I'm 99% sure you cant run them both at the same time ( you have set them up on a dual boot) for example my computer has a recovery partition at the end that is FAT and I cant get into it unless i want to run recovery, in which case I have to start from scratch, My friend has a copy of WIN 98 on a seperate HD for gaming (win 98 has to run fat) and has to reboot if he wants in, i;m sure thats not what you want, post the specs for the computer and the new drive and I'll have a better idea

 

[jackschmittusa]

Luke Friendly

Not "80 pin" but 80 conductor, 40 pin cables. Where did you get the idea he was trying to dual boot?

 

[JeffCos]

Luke,

I tried setting them to cable select and also used the intel bios updater to update the bios and still no luck. However, i tried to format only part of the drive (136gig to stay under the 137gig limit and I was able to access the drive. I read on the intel website that 48bit adressing is only supported on IDE ch 4, which already has my two DVD drives on it so I may have to switch some stuff around. Can i put 1 dvd drive on the primary IDE with the 80 gig HD and put the 250 on the other IDE with the other drive?

Gotta go to work, all responses are appreciated, but I will not be able to respond till 2pm est.

 

[bruceb]

Just put your Hard Drive on the Primary IDE Controller
Put your DVD Drives on the Secondary IDE Controller

That will usually work fine

 

[Jeff7]

Simple stuff first: Did you create a partition on it yet?

 

[JeffCos]

Originally posted by: bruceb
Just put your Hard Drive on the Primary IDE Controller
Put your DVD Drives on the Secondary IDE Controller

That will usually work fine

That's what I had and it doesn't work

UPDATE: There must either be a problem with 48 bit adressing in my registry or that it is not supported on this mobo. I can format the drive up to 137gig, but as soon as i try to format more than that I get the same problem. EnableBigLba is set in my registry so I'm thinking that the Intel D845Gebv2 does not support it. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[bruceb]

Do you BIOS Ver P17 installed ? ?

If not update it here: http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts...s=all&ProductID=889&OSFullName=Windows*+XP+Home+Edition&lang=eng&strOSs=45&submit=Go%21

And according to the intel site, your board should be able to do 48 Bit addressing

You might want to reload the Motherboard Chip Set Drivers

Also see here: http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm

And check that both of these registry keys & values are in place

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098/EN-US/

 

[JeffCos]

PROGRESS!!!!!!!!

I updated my Primary and Secondary IDE drivers, deleted and reentered the EnableBigLba registry key and reinstalled the Intel Chipset Driver and the Intel Application Accelerator and now I have 232 accessible gigabytes from the drive. It's still not the 250 that the drive contains, but it's a hell of a lot better than 137. But according to a bunch of articles I just read dealing with the differences in binary and decimal addition of storage space, a drive listed at 250 decimal gigabytes is displayed at 232.8 binary gigabytes.

 

[Underclocked]

232GB is probably the true capacity of the drive. Manufacturer's ratings use 1,000,000,000 bytes per GB.