• Welcome to Poasters Computer Forums.
 

News:

Welcome to the ARCHIVED Poasters Computer Forums (Read Only)

Main Menu

HDD problems

Started by sentofuno, September 27, 2003, 15:53 hrs

Previous topic - Next topic

sentofuno

hi all

i can't seem to 'find' my new HDD, i added a western digital 120Gb as a slave on the primary IDE option. i know the main drive works cuz i'm using it, and at startup DOS detects the new drive, but windows doesn't. well.. it did the first time and i tried to format it but it didn't work (and also showed it as being an 8Mb drive, not 120Gb.. )

i've checked the connections and the jumpers on both drives, i've tried add new hardware but either i can't find the right bit or it's just not there. as you can probably tell this is my first drive installation and i'm totally lost..

and idiot's guide would be much appreciated! thanks in advance.

trav

You have to format and partition the drive, there should be a utility that came with the drive from the manufacturer
CygBox | ASUS A7V400-MX| Athlon XP-2600+ (Barton core) (1900Mhz) |Gigabyte Radeon 9200SE| Onboard 6CH Sound|PC2700 400Mhz 768DDR

sentofuno

#2
when i bought the drive, it came in a plastic wrapper with nothing but those silica gel balls to keep it dry


err.. the ribbons.. there are two connections on it, on halfway down and one at the end. the first one is connected to the master and the last on the ribbon to the slave. that is right isn't it?

query

If you mean the BIOS detects the drive, that's a start.  It should detect the full capacity of the drive -- if it doesn't, you've got a BIOS limitation.

What version of Windows are you running?  Do not use an old DOS floppy to partition or format a drive that large - it will not work.


sentofuno

er... terminology is new to me but CMOS knows it's there for sure. i'm running win98 SE, and that is where i start having problems.

query

Boot into MS-DOS mode (F8 at startup).  Type fdisk at the prompt, and select the new drive (which will be Drive 1).  Create the partition(s) you need, and then reboot into Windows, where you will be able to format the drives.

trav

Query, dont you have to hold "Ctrl" when booting-up instead of "F8" ?
CygBox | ASUS A7V400-MX| Athlon XP-2600+ (Barton core) (1900Mhz) |Gigabyte Radeon 9200SE| Onboard 6CH Sound|PC2700 400Mhz 768DDR

query

Either should work, but you're correct - CTRL is easier because of the timing.


sentofuno

#8
Quote from: query on September 27, 2003, 16:18 hrs
select the new drive (which will be Drive 1).  Create the partition(s) you need, and then reboot into Windows, where you will be able to format the drives.


disk 1 (of 2) seems to be my old master drive

incase there is any confusion:

C: = master = 40Gb (old)
D: = slave    = 120Gb (new) ('D:' being i hope all this works and it ends up being that)

also you say create the partitions i need, it mentions 'active' 'logic' 'dos' partitions in fdisk. which should i use? and how many partitions for a drive that large?

if this is not going to be answered in a simple post perhaps there is already a dedicated thread.. (goes to check)

thanks for the help, i'm totally lost!



edit: btw i intend to use this drive purely for large data storage. like totally full of mpg/avi type files.  

and oh yeah.. i have a 3rd drive, which was the old slave drive (10Gb, which is why i have a new one 12x bigger).

if i just want to swap files over, ONCE, and am not going to actually keep the drive in the case afterwards instead of screwing it in and all, how safe is it to just kinda.. lie it down on it's side in the larger drive bay? if the sides were intended to touch the inside of the bays anyway.. is this too much of a risk to take and just pure laziness?

query

fdisk usually tracks 0 and 1, not 1 and 2, but as long as you can tell them apart, it's fine either way.

You do not want an active partition on the second drive - make a single, extended partition and put a logical drive in it.


sentofuno

fdisk seems to be reading the 120Gb drive as being more like 48Gb.. the other 40Gb one is reading at 38Gb-ish (which is what windows reads it as, i'm fine with that)

is this a problem?

query

Sounds like your system may not have support for 120 GByte drives.  What does the BIOS read the drive size as?

sentofuno


query

Are you up to date with your windows updates?  There are a couple of them that pertain to support for large hard drives.

sentofuno

#14
yes, there are no new updates save for a driver. but that is for audio, and i tried that once before and it.. well it taught me the lesson of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' shall we say :)

when you say my 'system' may not handle large drives, how so? my MB is an MS-6340M btw


edit: could http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044 be the problem?

query

That board should be fine with a 120 GByte drive.  When you invoked fdisk, how large a drive showed up before partitioning?

sentofuno

#16
well i d/led that patch in the link above:

it then recognised the drive as 11444MB. after having to copy an entire drive worth of files through DOS and ending up with losing all my long file names last year i took a gamble and presumed it meant 114440 or something, but only had 5 digits. so whenever it asked me to input a percentage i stuck in 100%. after a bit of work it came up with a partition of 1100% size, so i thought it had worked.

now i'm formatting it in windows, so fingers crossed.

just to ask again:

and oh yeah.. i have a 3rd drive, which was the old slave drive (10Gb, which is why i have a new one 12x bigger).

if i just want to swap files over, ONCE, and am not going to actually keep the drive in the case afterwards instead of screwing it in and all, how safe is it to just kinda.. lie it down on it's side in the larger drive bay? if the sides were intended to touch the inside of the bays anyway.. is this too much of a risk to take and just pure laziness?



edit: it worked! it now registers as 111Gb, god knows what happens to the other bit.. (my 10Gb drive always showed as 9.52Gb, my 40Gb at 38.2, etc etc..) but i won't grumble.


thanks for your help!

query

#17
Glad to hear it worked.  The size discrepancy comes from the fact that the drive manufacturers define a gigabyte in decimal terms, while the OS defines it in binary.

Multiply 120 decimal gigabytes by the ratio (10^9/2^30) and you get about 111 binary gigabytes.

There is a class-action lawsuit pending against most major hard drive and system vendors over this issue, so it won't be long before you see PC and drive makers quote caps in both numbers, the way monitor makers quote viewable and tube sizes together (there was a similar lawsuit a few years ago over that discrepancy).

sentofuno

oh yeah.. i did know that in a round about sort of way but i forgot.

yes yes everything works great, which is amazing, going from 'completly stuck' to -'completly satisfied' in the space of a single evening!

thanks again

scuzzy

#19
sentofuno,

I wish I had seen this earlier. Regardless, I'm glad things worked out for you. I'm not surprised, since query was the one helping you.

If you ever need to toy around with FDisk again, take a look here: Using FDisk to Partition
Antec Performance TX640B Case | WinXP Pro SP3 & Win7 64-bit | Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R | Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale LGA 775 3.16GHz Dual-Core | 8GB (4x2GB) PC6400 G-Skill RAM | eVGA 7600GT 256MB PCI-E | 74GB WD Raptor SATA 16MB Cache | 74GB WD Raptor SATA 8MB Cache | 320GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 16MB Cache | External 640GB WD Caviar SATA 32MB Cache | Sony DRU-V200S DVD/RW | PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W | Samsung SyncMaster 2494 (24") LCD Monitor | LG Flatron W2361V (23") LCD Monitor

sentofuno

ahh! yes if i ever need to do this again i will take a longer look.

but now i seem to have another problem, the transfer rate seems to be painfully slow. it took me all night to move something like 25Gb, and it looks like it will take me in the region of an hour to move 2.5Gb. i'm sure this is a lot longer than i remember?

query

Check to make sure the drives are running in Ultra DMA (ATA-xxx) mode.

FAT32 is not the most efficient way to setup a 120 GByte partition - there's a lot of administrative overhead with a file allocation table that size.  Unfortunately, with Windows 98 there is no other option.

sentofuno

Quote from: query on September 28, 2003, 08:37 hrs
Check to make sure the drives are running in Ultra DMA (ATA-xxx) mode.


..how?

sorry, i really am new to this!

query

The BIOS setup should tell you what mode the drives are operating in - ATA-100, etc.  If the indication is PIO mode, change it.


sentofuno

i have options for PIO and UDMA.

PIO:

auto
mode 0
mode 1
mode 2
mode 3
mode 4

UDMA:

disable
auto

so i can set UDMA to auto but how to disable PIO? is it just mode 0?

query

UDMA at auto is fine - that will allow the drives to run in the fastest mode that the controller will allow (as long as you have an 80-wire cable installed.

sentofuno

it's already set to auto. and i do have the 80 wire ribbon.

if there is no 'disable' for PIO, what should i do?

query

PIO mode will only be used when a device incapable of UltraDMA mode is installed.  All hard drives built in the last few years are UltraDMA compliant, so that's how the drives are running.

The problem with FAT32 is that once partition sizes grow, so does the size of the FAT, along with the administrative overhead needed to track all the files - if you can upgrade, you'll likely see much better performance with a drive that size if you upgrade to an OS that can use NTFS (Windows 2000 or Windows XP).

Otherwise, another way to improve performance is to break up the drive into smaller partitions - 30 GBytes or less each.

sentofuno

#28
right.. so essentially with win98, if i want the transfer rates to be anything above snail-paced i have to partition.


right, so.. can someone suggest a way to partition my drive WITHOUT having to wipe off all the files already on there? i read the FDISK post, and the first thing it says is i will have to reformat. i really don't want to spend another 12 hours transferring all that data back over to my old drive.

Neon

#29
It sounds like you may want to take a look at Powerquest Partition Magic , or BootIt NG
Area 64 project|Asus SK8N|nForce3 Pro 150 chipset|AMD Athlon 64 FX-51|2x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC3200R|eVGA GeForce 6800GT|WD Caviar SE 1200JD SATA|Plextor PX-708A 8x DVD+R|Plextor PX-116A 16x DVD-ROM|Lian Li PC-60H1S|Antec TruePower 430W ATX|WinXP x64 edition