Installing a New Western Digital Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter W. eWatson
  • Start date Start date
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 its
wild guess at the unformatted drive.
Click to expand...

You must first "define" a partition with Disk Management, on the drive
before you can format it.
 
smlunatick said:
You must first "define" a partition with Disk Management, on the drive
before you can format it.
Click to expand...
I'm sure you are right, 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.
 
Thanks for your patience on this long post. I finally called WD and
asked for support, $15. The drive is kaput. I'm buying a replacement.
 
W. eWatson said:
I'm sure you are right, 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.
Click to expand...

You should either install Partition Magic ot the WD Tools (Acronis True Image
WD Edition) to partition/format the drive.
Acronis True Image WD Edition:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=502&lang=en

--

Brian A. Sesko
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://members.shaw.ca/dts-l/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
 
W. eWatson said:
Thanks for your patience on this long post. I finally called WD and
asked for support, $15. The drive is kaput. I'm buying a replacement.
Click to expand...

If the drive was new and still under warranty you shouldn't have to pay
anything or buy a replacement.

--

Brian A. Sesko
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://members.shaw.ca/dts-l/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
 
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