View Full Version : my ME not finding 2nd HD
Mikeyboy
January 15th, 2003, 08:50 PM
Hello, I have Compaq Presario 5014us running Win ME. Original 60Gb HD and added another seagate 30Gb. Worked fine untill I messed with it. hehehe. I wanted to reinstal OS on the 30 Gb HD and use the big 60Gb HD for video editing. I formatted the 30 (which previously had Win 98 installed) and did a scandisk while in the slave position, all was fine. Then moved 30 the the end of cable, (left the 60 unplugged) switched jumper to master and ran seagate tools. scandisk for errors and wrote zeros to drive. Then tried to install win ME from compaqs recovery cd with no succes. I assumed it was a copywrite dealy so OS could not be installed on multiple computers. I added the 60Gb HD in slave position and computer started fine. The bios finds both drives but win ME does not find the 30Gb HD. I have tried a new cable, jumpers in every position including cable select on both and did a full system restore on the 60. Still no luck. Other than installing HD on the wife's computer for testing, I am out of ideas. Any help will be appreciated greatly.
Mike
enat66
January 15th, 2003, 10:05 PM
Is the 30gb harddrive formatted? If not then the bios would see it but not windows.
Alfons
January 16th, 2003, 02:14 AM
If you wrote zero's on it (some call this low-level-formating) then it has no "personality". The BIOS can see it because the Disk BIOS answers the computer properly, but the OS can't see it because there's nothing there to see - all the configuration tables are missing. You'll need to use a Partition Manager on it first and then Format each partition. For this you can use FDISK and FORMAT that are found on the W9X Startup Disks, or Partition Magic, or Ranish, etc.
Mikeyboy
January 17th, 2003, 03:14 PM
thanks, I just did it in the wrong order. I thought the seagate EZ Install tool would wipe al the info but aparently not. It kept finding fragments of Win 98. So then I wrote zeros and forgot to reformat again, hehehe. And the first time I wrote zeros it did not work..it was done in 5 min! last night it wrote zeros for almost 4 hours. thanks for your help
mikeee
Alfons
January 17th, 2003, 06:27 PM
You're welcome, hope it worked. That particular "format" does take a long time, and you can complement that whole process with a write-verification which, although taking longer, does verify the entire disk as well as completely cleaning it. Some security standards require this to be done a minimum of three times before it's considered to be "safe".