help with new hard drive.

[cliff60]

Ive got xp pro sp3. The hard drive is 40 GB and full. So i got an 80 GB and installed it as a slave. The old 1 is a smart III ultra ATA. The new 1 is PATA. Thats what pc world said i needed. Ive installed it But i cant put any data on it. At 1st it only showed up in System hardware but no drive letter. In disk management it says disk 0 for the old HDD and disk 1 for the new 1 with unallocated next to it. The only option it gave me was to format it as a dynamic drive which i did. That gave it drive f and it shows up in my computor. I want to use it as a slave cause my old drive is full. Or transfer all my data to it and use that as the main drive and the old 1 as a slave. I tried the transfer wizard. That collected all my data but didnt transfer it to the new drive. The 40GB HDD is partitioned with Ubuntu in the partition so its duel boot. I havent got the xp disks as i got it 2nd hand. I dont want to spend to much money on it at the mo as its only a temp replacement for my acer thats in for repair and wont get it back for about 2 months. But then ill be upgrading the old 1. Im only keeping the case. everything else will be stripped out and replaced with an AMD motherboard.. As my acer cant be upgraded cause the case is to small and only use a pc for games and web. The acer only has a 220w PSU so cant get a graphics card good enough for games. But for now i need to get the new hard drive up and running so i have room to install some games. Even after deleting all non essential software ive only got 2GB of free space. Ubuntu has a 12GB partition but thats full as well. Can anyone tell me how to get the new HDD working as a slave? In properties it does say raid 5 but not how to put into that. The only option it gives me is to put it in basic or dynamic.

[Dalo Harkin]

40 GB as a system drive is quite small, have you ran the disk cleanup wizard by going to my computer> right click on the C:/ and then properties> general> disk cleanup

It scans for dump files, temp files etc and then gives you the option to remove them, I have seen this clear over 8GB of space in older systems...

 

Let us know how you get on.

The other thing you could do is install any games that you want onto the secondary drive, as the system is quite old you shouldnt see any major performance loss by having the files on the other disk.

[cliff60]

I use Ccleaner as it does a better job than disk clean up. It also fixes reg problems and uninstalls programs. I run it everyday. It ussually clears about 300MB each time. I also run smart defrag everyday as win defrag doesnt defrag as much. Ive tried to install to the new drive but i cant. I only get install to c option. I removed the jumper pin to make it a slave but i still cant get access to the new drive. It shows up in my computer as drive f But cant put anything on it. It has USMT2.UNC folder on it with some image dat files and a status file in the folder. In disk management i right click on the new drive and then properties. In that it gives me the option to make it raid 5. But as far as i can tell that only changes the colour of the bar. Its set to dynamic drive at the mo. In help it says to right click the drive and click intilialze but that option isnt there. The only option it had was to make it a dynamic drive.

[cliff60]

Im still trying to work out how XP works as ive never used it before. Ive used 3.1, 95, 98, 2000 and win 7. Ive been using win7 for the last 10 months on my new PC but that is in for repairs after a worm infected the linux partition and spread to the windows partition an destroyed the BIOS. SO only got the old PC to keep me going till i get my other PC back. Which they estimate will be 2 or 3 months. Most games wont work on the old PC as it has all intell stuff. IE pentium 4 intel graphics sound and modem. So i expect it to be slow. But having to wait half an hr for a program to open is realy slow lol. MY new pc has AMD athlon 2 X4, Nvidia 9200 4GB ram and Nvidia 1000Mbs ethernet card and a 1TB HDD. I forgot how slow intel systems were but dont think ive ever had 1 as slow as this lol. But think most of that is due to the hard drive being to small. Thats why im trying to get the new drive up and running. I added another 1GB of ram a few days ago which helped a little bit as it only had 1GB in it. I was going to put more but was told i cant have more than 2GB of ram with XP.

[Dalo Harkin]

So at the moment there is nothing on the second drive that you need?

Format it as NTFS and then try and initialise the disk.

 

Word of warning though, do not run defrags or software tools everyday, defrags for one stress you HDD internals

Edited November 26, 2010 by Dalo Harkin

[cliff60]

I did format it into NTFS. It was unalocated when i 1st installed it. The only option it gave me was to format it into a dynamic drive. It was after that when it came up as drive F. The only option there now is to change it to basic drive.

[cliff60]

Smart defrag works in the background and defrags every file when its closed down automaticly. But i disabled it cause it was using to many resources. But i keep getting popups telling me i need to defrag. Im also getting my AV keep giving me popups about a worm in the windows updates. Everytime it gets deleted it just downloads it again even with auto updates turned off. I know the worm that destroyed my new pc came from microsoft cause my linux firewall tracked it back to them. Plus my linux OS was constantly being hacked by Microsoft or so my firewall was reporting.

[cliff60]

Just looked at system info for the new drive. Its drive F local fixed drive. compressed. no. File system NTFS. Size 74.53GB. free space 65.30 GB. So there is something on it as its an 80GB HDD. But apart from the folder i mentioned above which is less than 1GB i cant find anything else on it.

[Dalo Harkin]

If you didnt put the data there, then you need to delete it if you can as it may be stopping you from doing anything with the drive..

 

So what happens when you try and format the drive then, as it shoudnt stop you from formatting it

[cliff60]

I reformatted it. Its still dynamic. Think it might of put files on when i used the transfer wizard to try and move my files onto it but i could not use the files so maybe i have to put it on master to use them when i get them on there. The folder with the image dat files is now gone so think thats what was taking up all the space. But the size didnt match what it said i used. The help file in disk management doesnt help cause nothing in there is showing up in the options. The only options im getting is format or asign drive letter nothing else. both options just format it into dynamic drive.

[Dalo Harkin]

If it doesnt have a drive letter then you wont be able to access it.....

 

What happens when a HDD is connected, is that Windows checks that there are drivers for the device and if not gets them.

 

Then what you need to do is to format the device using disk management then when that is done , you then right click and activate the disk, where it gets assigned a drive letter and can be accessed through my computer

Job done.

 

If the above isnt happening then you have an issue, somewhere along the line..