Formatting a new second hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter David Brown
  • Start date Start date
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David Brown

I have a computor running windows XP home with a 20Gig
hard drive ST320423A by seagate which is an ATA/66 type.
All works well it uses FAT32
Today i installed a new ST380011A seagete drive which is
NTFs file system only and is ATA/100 type.
Eventually got disk recognised by setup and then XP but it
says it needs to be formatted.
Every time i do this it eventually finished and says
format failed.
Result no usable new second hard drive.

How can I make windows format this drive?

Any help will be much apreciated!!

Dave
 
Try formatting your new disk as FAT32 as well. I don't
think FAT32 systems will work with NTFS drives. The
other option is to re-format your first disk as NTFS,
then re-install and try again. This is a lot of effort
though.
 
David said:
I have a computor running windows XP home with a 20Gig
hard drive ST320423A by seagate which is an ATA/66 type.
All works well it uses FAT32
Today i installed a new ST380011A seagete drive which is
NTFs file system only and is ATA/100 type.
Eventually got disk recognised by setup and then XP but it
says it needs to be formatted.
Every time i do this it eventually finished and says
format failed.
Result no usable new second hard drive.

How can I make windows format this drive?

Any help will be much apreciated!!

Dave
Click to expand...

Well... there really isn't anything like an "NTFS only" drive, AFAIK. You'd
need to *use* NTFS in order to format the 80 gigs as one partition, or you
could use FAT32 if you cut it apart into smaller (<32G) partitions first.
Are you sure you've got it setup correctly in your BIOS and it is being
recognised properly? If that's not right, you'll have problems like you
mentioned - format runs and then eventually fails when it tries to format
heads/cylinders/sectors/whatever that don't exist.

-craig
 
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