Been searching for an answer to this one

scf2510 · Post by **scf2510** » July 21st, 2005, 1:00 pm

*BEWARE* This ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. In my pc i have to hard drives. The first drive is a 20GB and is the master drive. The second one is a Western Digital 80GB and is my slave drive. A week ago I re-formatted the 20GB drive and re-installed windows XP. After the Installation I went to my 80GB drive and it was, 1: Making me format, which I was like damn cuz i had 15GB of files on it. But oh well i'll just try and get everything back later is what I figured. Nothing was too important on there. 2: When I formatted it, The drive was only reading 33.4GB. Couldn't figure out why, and thats when I started asking people in these forums (I don't know much about computers). Well anyway I've tried using the data lifeguard disk in DOS and I can change the drive size to the correct size but it never saves over into windows. (Windows is on the 20GB drive). I tried setting up the 80GB HD with the program outside of windows XP once and I got an error that read: ARC Firmware Boot configuration problem, Did not generate ARC name for Hal and System Paths. I got to re-install windows again because I couldn't fix it. I know why it's it's doing this now but I can't get it to just read my drive as an 80 GB drive. I've formatted it a million times with no luck. I did find something in computer management though (if you right click on "my comp" and click on "manage"). There is a dynamic disk feature that says it will fix it. the problem is, is that when I go to do that option it tells me I am not going to be able to run windows off of any other drive. If I tried running the Dynamic disk for the C:\ would I then be able to do it for my 80 GB drive? -Right now at the moment the drive is connected but is not showing in my computer (figure mihgt as well go from scratch). When you go into the computer management and go to the drive and click new partition there are two options. I can make it a "Primary Partition", or an "Extended Partition". I don't know if formatting it with one of these will solve the problem or not but thats all i know of at this moment. I have a feeling if I guess what to do I might not be able to get back into windows and I could spend another half of a day re-installing everything. -Sorry this thread is so long. This is probably the 4th or 5th computer help forum i've been too in this past week so I wanted to get everything I can remember down so theres no "try this" and me responding "already tried it". If you made it through this thank you for your time reading and possibly solving this thing.

scf2510 · Post by **scf2510** » July 21st, 2005, 1:08 pm

and oh yeah, I formatted the 20GB Drive using NTFS.

scf2510 · Post by **scf2510** » July 21st, 2005, 1:36 pm

Sorry my retardedness kicked in, it doesn't matter if i make a primary or extended partions. Eitehr way it comes out to 32 GB. I also tried using partition magic adn that didnt work.

scf2510 · Post by **scf2510** » July 21st, 2005, 3:15 pm

if the jumpers were not set in the right place might this be happening? The only reason I don't think it should be is because before i re-formatted I had Win XP on here. The only reason I re-installed windows is because regseeker messed up my comp and the backup it made wouldnt load. I'm not quick to pull the thing out of the system because its kinda buried in there. Not the easiest for me to get to. Anyone think the jumpers would be causing this?

richh0323 · Post by **richh0323** » July 22nd, 2005, 7:07 pm

First of all the jumpers are just for master / slave, if you see both listed on the POST then you are ok. Now lets get to the size issue, in the BIOS are you set up right, is it in auto or do you have a size put in (cylinders/heads/sectors). You can do it either way, but if you put in the data make sure it's set right (cylinders/heads/sectors). Now you have wiped the data, so check with Fdisk, and see if if you have any other partitions on it, if so you may want to make one. Now here is the kicker older BIOS do have a size limitation of 32 gig, do you have a older BIOS? Check it out on the POST screen as you boot, write down the information and do a Google search on the make, if you want to upgrade you may want to check this site out. http://www.esupport.com/ Now if you do have a old BIOS, don't use a drive overlay this will cause problems down the road, I would suggest using Fdisk and make 3 partitions 2 @ 30 gig, and 1 @20 gig