Funkiness with HDD & WinXP...

Had a major crash the other day but was a good excuse to buy some new hardware. :)

I had a Maxtor 40GB drive split up into 2 20GB partitions. I added an 80GB hard drive. I use this as the main drive since it has the 8MB buffer. Anywho, I installed WinXP pro on the new drive. Then, while in Windows, I transfered the files and settings from the 2 partitions to the new drive.

Then using Paragons, Partition Magic, I deleted all of the partition information on the 40GB drive. Reformated using PM, and rebooted.

Now I cant get windows to regonize the drive as an accessible drive. PM can see it and my device manager sees it and calculates all of its info properly. Any ideas?

Im thinking I might just have to Low Level Format the sucker but am not sure if this will do it.

Thanks in advance.


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Also, since when I installed WinP Pro on the 80GB drive, I had the 40GB drive installed as the slave. Since they already had WinP installed on it, they still tehnically were referred to as drive C & D as they were on the old install. So When Windows formated the 80GB drive, it installed it as drive F (CD as E).

Is there any way to reset this? Just curious

If you run Disk management in the Computer managment application what properties does it show for the missing drive?

what kind of partition did you create? if fat32, try booting with a win98 boot disc and running fdisk, or does Partition Magic still pick the drive up? if not, I'm seriously surprised.

Your drive manufactor will have tools to zero fill the drive,

update,

I was using Partition Manager, not magic.

Used Partition Magic this morning and all is well.

glad to hear.