New hard drive, not detected.

[Foxfire]

I got a nice new 80gig hard drive today, plugged the sucker and in and... it wasn't detected. After trying two cables, every jumper setting, trying it as a slave to my old hard drive, putting it in my friends computer it still hasn't been found.

I'm hoping the problem is that we need a 133 ide cable since neither of us have one, but is there anything else that may be the cause of it not being found?

[jambo]

Dead Hard Drive.

[iaidoka]

I had a similar problem last week when I whacked in my new HD.. I thaught it was a dud.. however it was a case of I had forgot to right click my computer , Manage and format the new HD >_< I felt really stupid.

[and3w]

Originally posted by jambo
Dead Hard Drive.

I think I would agree, I presume it still under guarantee, I'd get a replacement from the vendor (NOT a "we'll look at it Sir, come back next week!;) ) a "nice new 80gig hard drive" as you put it.

It isn't the case that it's a pretty old 'puter that won't recognise anything over 4 gig or whatever it was, is it? I'm not a techie so they could probably tell you more if so.
Good luck either way :)

[Foxfire]

A few more details.

I'm running a pIII 700 with a 20 gig at the moment.

The 80 gig hard drive, I ordered on wednesday it got delivered today (friday).

I opened it up, plugged it in and zip, got nothing happening.

Is there a way to tell it's a dead hard drive for sure?

[flow]

Originally posted by Foxfire
Is there a way to tell it's a dead hard drive for sure?

I've had a dead drive before. I wasn't sure so I took it back to the shop, with the receipt of course. They were so busy, that they just threw me another drive. It worked first time.

Best if you take it back and say it might be cactus and ask if they can check it for you. 10 minutes later you're going to know either way...

[Foxfire]

Originally posted by iaidoka
I had a similar problem last week when I whacked in my new HD.. I thaught it was a dud.. however it was a case of I had forgot to right click my computer , Manage and format the new HD >_< I felt really stupid.

I didn't even know I had to initialise a hard drive before it would be found....

*feels like a right royal dumbass now*

Thanks for the comment though it helped me out muchly. ^_^

[and3w]

Originally posted by Foxfire
I didn't even know I had to initialise a hard drive before it would be found....

*feels like a right royal dumbass now*

Thanks for the comment though it helped me out muchly. ^_^

So, problem solved???

[Deimos]

Hehehe, I did the same thing when I got my HD - plugged it in and booted it up and spent half an hour mucking around with jumper settings before I realised that I should probably format the thing - I felt like quite the idiot, but we all gotta learn sometime.

[Foxfire]

Welllll...

Half solved, having a bit of trouble finding out how to format the silly thing.... It's apparently initialised, but I can't find anywhere on how to format the sucker.

[flow]

er...

format <x>:\ ?????

[Foxfire]

need to be able to access dos for that don't you?

Anyways I just downloaded partition magic and it seems to have done the trick nicely, it's all formatted and partitioned...

Well it should be at any rate.

[pliskin]

i have to ask. is it a seagate drive, if it is , i think u have to special programme called drive dr.it should be on a floppy disk with the drive.
i know i had this probnlem with my last HD

[108]

If you're in Windows XP,

Click Start
Right-click "My Computer"
Select "Manage"

In the tree thing, go to "Storage->Disk Management"

Right-click and select format on the drive.

[Foxfire]

Aye 108 I was in that section, about the only thing it would let me do was a very limited partitioning... I was right clicking, and left clicking and looking everywhere I could but could nary find a thing.

[Foxfire]

Ok I'm officially a dumbass...

We've got the hard drive working... finally... but I somehow managed to lose almost 50 gig of space through some dodgy partioning that I did wrong...

Is there anyway to get my hard drive right back to the start so I can recover this? or is it gone for good.

I'm not sure what info you need, so ask me the questions and I'll try my best to answer them.

[Uther Pendragon]

If you dont mind wiping all the data off your new 80G all you have to do is fdisk the 80G drive and then re-create the partition. I myself usually set up all my partitions under linux as that's my primary os, I used to just use a win98 boot disk to do my fdisking in windows land, not sure if XP/2K etc have gui fdisking programs, you just want to trash the partition structure and recreate it. (DO NOT TRASH YOUR C: DRIVE OR YOU WILL NUKE YOUR SYSTEM)

[tikdoph]

If you've got Partition Magic, which is a very helpful app, then it shouldn't be too hard to fix things. PM should allow you to resize, move, or merge partitions (amongst other things). Just right click on the drive you want changed and select the appropriate option.

If the option you want isn't there, reformat the drive using PM and try again.

[Foxfire]

Well I tried fdisk that's how I partitioned the 33gig that remains... and removing those partitions and stuff still left me with the 32gig...

[Spingo]

If it's a PIII 700 that you're using, flash your BIOS - there's a good chance that it's what is responsible for your system not detecting more than 32GB of the drive (or the latter 72GB limit)

Secondly, don't use fdisk to partition your drives. I actually laugh at people who try partitioning large drives with that tool. The fdisk tool that ships with Windows and MS-DOS has not been worked on this decade, and is not designed to handle the large drives that you see today.

You're using XP by the sounds of it, and I don't know what you've done wrong when you were attempting to partition/format the drive under Disk Administrator. When using this tool, remember, you have a disk. The disk needs to have partitions. A partition can be formatted.

Seriously, the app is piss easy to use. If you have trouble, I suggest that you STFW, or get someone who knows what they're doing to trash your drive for you - at least they'll have fun doing it.

Oh, and what's the bet that you formatted the drive using FAT32??? :p

(PS, sorry if this post sounds harsh - I know it's not PC, but sometimes you gotta lay the smack down on a ho...)

[Truephoenix]

You probably are using an old fdisk, the fdisk on the win98 oem startup disk won't recognise drives over 64 gig you can grab the proper utility from here


http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

it should be about halfway down the page, formatted my 160gb SATA fine with it

[frednurk]

Harsh- well yes a bit. For seagate drives I found the best tools were from their website. They have a free diagnostic tool, as well as the HD setup tool. Both are dead simple to use. As long as you can boot to DOS and then run a floppy, you will be fine. Everything else is done for you. The set-up disc will detect, partition,format and transfer all data including OS to an 80 Gig disc in around 20 mins. Beats the shit out of reloading everything manually. Link here (http://www.seagate.com/support/)
Flashing the Bios is not something you should be attempting if you are unsure of what you are doing.