Win.XP with NTFS doesn't won't boot with a formated Fat32 slave drive, Hangs on Post veryifying drives

[Jackman]

No mater what i try, WinXP NTFS won't boot with a formated Fat32 drive w/o a operating system, set as a slave, or Cable select, or jumper removed. I was on the phone with Maxtor and they said it should. The drive once had 98se on it and it saw the drive with an operating system on it. I Fdisked & formated with a Primary Dos partion set and hooked it up and it hangs on posting verifying the drives. Its not just this drive, i've tried 2 other drives, also tried different working IDE 80pin cables. nothing works. I want this as a second drive for MP3's so if others out ther have this setup, how did you do it? mayby set the drive as a logical drive instead? I don't think it needs an OS just to be seen? In 98 or ME Fat32 drives were recognized but maybe NTFS won't work with a formated Fat32 drive. PS i tried formating it as NTFS with a XP Pro install CD and removed it after i formated the disk with NTFS before you install XP in the next step after restart, didn't work either. :disgust:

 

[Sid59]

i've done it many many times over. something is not right... i know you went over this but let me repost them ...

1. make sure the IDE connection is secure. both on the mobo and hard drive.
2. make sure the cable is on right side up. the missing pin should be on the bottom.
3. make sure you have working cables

try swapping the slave fat32 as the boot drive. use the existing ide wire and see if it works. if the drive works out, then you have one less problem.

 

[ForsakenMaster]

Did you delete the old fat32 partition prior to formatting with NTFS ?

 

[Jackman]

Technically, how can a guy format the drive to be NTFS? short of using a XP disk and pulling it out after the format procedure. It didn't see the drive that way also. I can put a normal XP harddrive on and boots fine, if i add the Fat32 drive (fdisked & formated) the system hangs and won't boot.

 

[Sid59]

Originally posted by: Jackman
Technically, how can a guy format the drive to be NTFS? short of using a XP disk and pulling it out after the format procedure. It didn't see the drive that way also. I can put a normal XP harddrive on and boots fine, if i add the Fat32 drive (fdisked & formated) the system hangs and won't boot.

did you try the drive as primary boot drive? with nothing else?

 

[Jackman]

Yes i did today; went over to a friends with it, His computer wouldn't see it also. I then proceeded to format it with the XP OS disk. when it was done with a long NTFS format. It wouldn't see it either. PS,
if i put Me on it, it sees the drive and access's it just fine. But i don't want an Operating syatem on that drive, just MP3 storage. That makes 3 computers that don't see the formated drive. Bummer.............
PS i also tried different ide cable than the Primary drive. If i had a raid board i'm sure it would be seen.

 

[Sid59]

hrm. that's weird. sounds like it's broke.

how did you format it?

 

[Jackman]

Just used Fdisk & Format off a 98se floppy. And as in my earlier post i formated it with the XP install disk on my friends computer and his still wouldn't see it when its hooked up as a slave drive on his computer. Its not Broke, i can install XP or 98 or ME on it and it works perfectly fine. But i want it as a STORAGE drive without an operating system on it. As in my earlier post i believe that XP with a NTFS doesn't see a Fat32 formated slave drive. (others say it does) Now maybe if i ran a LESS stable XP with a Fat32 file syatem on my primary drive it might see it. as in Fat32 & Fat32 being compatable. as to NTFS and a Fat32 File system not seeing eachother as compatable. Now if i had a RAID setup, i feel they would be seen, because raid uses seperate controlers to see different drives.

 

[sandorski]

The drive might be borked, but I wonder if you have the FAT drive set to "Active". If so, turn that off.

 

[Jackman]

The Bios on the MSI KT3 Ultra is pretty limited................all i see is auto detect drives. where would i turn it off? I also tried it on an Intel board setup and a Gateway..........thats 3 computers that don't see or BooT with that drive hooked up. Take it off and all boot just fine. If i install any <XP,ME,98se> operating system on it, its seen by each computer just fine. I want it for storage only.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: Jackman
The Bios on the MSI KT3 Ultra is pretty limited................all i see is auto detect drives. where would i turn it off? I also tried it on an Intel board setup and a Gateway..........thats 3 computers that don't see or BooT with that drive hooked up. Take it off and all boot just fine. If i install any <XP,ME,98se> operating system on it, its seen by each computer just fine. I want it for storage only.

Setting it to "Active" or not is something done with FDisk. So you'll need to go into FDisk to de-activate it(don't recall the proper steps, but the option is in the menues of FDisk).

Setting a FAT Partition "Active" makes that the Partition that the drive uses to boot from. So what I think is happening( this happens when 2 FAT drives have Active partitions) is that the computer begins to Boot, sees an Active drive as Master, but when it sees the Slave as Active as well, it disregards the Slave drive in order to avoid a conflict. Or something to that effect.

 

[Jackman]

Thanks everyone for the fine advice, i got the drive recognized. I had to Fdisk & Format as usual. then i verifyed the master slave setting on both drives. Aparently the other 2 computer's have no jumpers set to master because there is only one drive in them. My 2nd computer had the Master jumper set wrong, Maxtor has 2 jumper settings for this drive, One has a single jumper (Master) and the other one has 2 jumpers called (Master W/CLJ) I changed it to the single jumper master and the 2nd drive set to slave and booted fine. Talk about stupid little details as that. Again thanks guys..................