PC Pals Forum

Technical Help & Discussion => Self Building, Upgrading & General Hardware Help => Topic started by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 11:21

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 11:21

I am having a problem formatting a hard drive.
Its an 80gb maxtor runnning on a pentium 3 800mhz with winxp.
I have tried installing partition magic and it wont take it. I have tried the latest powermax utility and when i boot from floppy it says that it cant boot to or open dos or something similar press any key to continue.

I want to re install XP and start networking my computers but at the moment i cant get any further with an xp reinstall and am stuck.

Any help greatfully appreciated. Thanks.

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Sandra on April 17, 2006, 11:27

Will it not format when you boot from the XP cd and get to the options to install on an existing partition or to delete or create a partition ?

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 11:30

Will try it now

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Sandra on April 17, 2006, 11:34

Ok.

I usually delete any existing partitions when given the option then create a new one at the size I want it, on a 80 gig drive I would usually have 30 or 40 as my C partition.
Install to that partition, it will then format it as NTFS, unless you have less than 32 gig.

After XP has installed I then allocate the remaing space as another partition and format it using XPs disk management utility in Admin Tools.

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 11:57

Hi Sandra, I wish i had read your post before i started  :D .
Well it is working like that now. But i just deleted the whole partition and just let it go without creating any partitions. Main concern over though at least now i can put a clean install on. Thought there might have been a problem with the hard drive. I can make a coffee now while it reinstalls  :D

Thanks again Sandra

Any ideas why it wouldnt let me install partition magic or boot into Powermax?

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Mac on April 17, 2006, 12:03

Whan a drive is unreceptive to data and difficult to install it often helps to run a burn in test.

Still, you are installing now.

You can always shrink the C: drive down with a partition resizer and put in an extended partition.

E.G.

(https://www.pc-pals.com/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi14.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa327%2FXPOS%2FDriveMan03.jpg&hash=ef5328d4c55960ffff02816ae68cbe23363bd230)

Then you can use Tweak UI to move the My Documents folder and sub folders to their own partitions.

Partition sizes are 10240,10240,20480, (MB) and the remainder.

Don't know about PowerMax unless your floppy diskette is a bit tired.

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 12:09

Thanks Mac, thats really useful to know for the future  :laugh:

I Liked your "sticky" posts to the new advanced forum as well. Great stuff and some very useful information there.

Thanks a lot

Title: Thanks!
Post by: Mac on April 17, 2006, 12:24

If your CMOS battery isn't a lithium one, and it is more than two years old I would change it when you can. You can get all sorts of problems if the voltage is on the low side. I need to change mine.

:thanks: for your kind comments.

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Sandra on April 17, 2006, 12:38

If a drive is almost full, say within 5% then sometimes it has problems being accessed by some programs.
I have had an external hard drive that wouldnt open properly as it was almost full.
I did however manage to format it from a boot disk.

Early versions of Partition magic wont work with NTFS I believe so that may be why it wouldnt work for you, I would have thought that with your Powermax being the latest version then that shouldnt have the same problem  :?

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 12:39

You welcome Mac.

Think i will buy a batch of new batteries the ones i have are shall we say a "little" over two years old  :wink:

Thanks again

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 12:41

Thanks Sandra it was version 7 partition magic.
Oh I'd better go and check on the progress  :laugh:

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Sandra on April 17, 2006, 12:43

If its still installing then it wouldnt take much longer to start over again and  delete and create the partitions in the size that you want, rather than use Partition Magic later.
Especially if your version wont work with NTFS.

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Mac on April 17, 2006, 12:46

Or you can use BootIT NG's partition resizer from a floppy. (Just don't install the boot manager.)

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: kevinho on April 17, 2006, 12:49

Thanks its going along nicely at the moment.

Thanks both for all your help

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Mac on April 17, 2006, 14:41

Quote from: "kevinho"

Thanks its going along nicely at the moment.

Thanks both for all your help

Good to hear that it's all going smoothly.

Quote from: "Sandra"

...it will then format it as NTFS, unless you have less than 32 GB

After XP has installed I then allocate the remaining space as another partition and format it using XPs disk management utility in Admin Tools.

You can format to NTFS under 32 GB too you know.

XP won't let you format partitions larger than 32 GB to FAT32

Don't you make an Extended partition and then put a Logical drive in it?

Title: Problem formatting Hard Drive
Post by: Sandra on April 17, 2006, 15:00

I was just letting Kevin know that he would only have the NTFS option available, unless he made the partition smaller than 32 gig Mac.
 
I usually just make the second partion another primary one so that it leaves all the options open in case I want to dual boot or something like that later  :)

Title: English - French
Post by: Mac on April 17, 2006, 15:47

Oops, 5% is a bit low! Need to keep 15% free-space on all partitions really for defrag to work properly. More where the paging file needs to grow and there are a lot of temporary files which accumulate during a session.

I just use the 1st Logical drive within the Extended partition for a dual boot.

It is aways handy to have a dual boot if the primary OS won't boot for some reason, or to have a KNOPPIX CD handy.