Installing a New Western Digital Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter W. eWatson
  • Start date Start date
W

W. eWatson

My C-drive is a WCD1200JB, IDE. I'm trying to install a new one,
WCD1200JB also, as a slave. The drive on the end of the cable is the old
drive. The slave, the new one, is in the middle of the cable. I have no
pins used on the new drive, and one jumper over the two pins one set
away from the power plug. When I fire up, the machine sees both master
and slave in bios, but in Win2000 there is no trace of the new drive.
What's wrong here?
 
Dave said:
Are you looking in Disk Management snap-in?
Click to expand...
I have no idea what that is.

Here's the latest.

The two drives are identical, 120G WD drives, same models. Yesterday I
discovered if I went into bios with the two drives, the slave being the
new one and fresh out of the box w/o any use whatsoever, they differed
in size, cylinders and so on. However,I hooked up the single (new one)
questionable HD to the master position on the IDE cable, and removed
the jumpers. It showed the correct 120GB, and other parameters. I then
used the other cable, and got the same results. It would seem to me that
sufficient power is reaching the end of the cable, and likely the middle
connector.

Awhile ago, I went to a repair shop and mentioned this to them. They
said try SP4 for W2k. I hope it exists.
 
Dave said:
Start|Run|diskmgmt.msc

SP4? Yes, it exists.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/6/A/E6A04295-D2A8-40D0-A0C5-241BFECD095E/W2KSP4_EN.EXE
Click to expand...
Well, running diagnostics said the drive was OK, but it has no way to
format it, nor does diskmgmt.msc, as far as I can tell. I see something
about a volume, but am not sure what to use if it does indeed format a
drive. It shows the slave as drive 1, and wanted me to write a
signature, which I did. It shows that drive as 7.87G, which probably is
its wild guess at the unformatted drive.
 
W. eWatson said:
Well, running diagnostics said the drive was OK, but it has no way to
format it, nor does diskmgmt.msc, as far as I can tell. I see something
about a volume, but am not sure what to use if it does indeed format a
drive. It shows the slave as drive 1, and wanted me to write a
signature, which I did. It shows that drive as 7.87G, which probably is
its wild guess at the unformatted drive.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm getting closer. I tried Help and it shows, more or less, how
to format the drive. Unfortunately, it thinks the limit is 8G.
 
W. eWatson said:
Well, I'm getting closer. I tried Help and it shows, more or less, how
to format the drive. Unfortunately, it thinks the limit is 8G.
Click to expand...
I think I need to partition the drive, but here's my problem now. It
appears diskmgmt.msc is different between W2K and XP. I'm, of course,
using W2K. If I look at help it wants me to right click on disk 1 to see
a menu with Partition on it. Well, the only choice is pretty much Create
Volume. When I do I get a volume wizard. It shows the max size for the
volume as 8G. There are two windows. The right one says Disk 1 and the
other is empty. Betwen them are arrow pointing to the left. One is
remove volume, and the other is remove all. I select remove volume, and
the size drops to 0 and Disk 1 appears in the left window. Going further
gets me nowhere. In factt, the dynamic volume disk1 hasn't changed.
Very odd.

I think there's a disk mgmt in Control Panel that may be different.
Dunno. I found it on my XP machine. If I dig around, I might find a CD
from Western D that has something that'll solve this. I do have
Partition Magic but it's not on the W2k machine. Maybe it's time to put
it there.
 
I finally called WD and asked for support, $15. The drive is kaput. I'm
buying a replacement. Too bad I waited a year to actually install it.
 
Disk Management will know immediately what size the disk is. Yes, the first
step is to write a disk signature (aka initialize the disk) Then create
partition and format. I might have guessed it was possibly a limitation of
the controller (or mobo) firmware. Did you run the WD disk tools to tell you
the disk is bad?



--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
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