Hard Drive Problems

[George Ditmore]

Basic symptoms: New 120 gig hard drive (Maxtor 6Y120P). Is recognized by
BIOS by not by Windows XP Install CD (message to the effect that it can't
find a hard drive after getting the the point where I press "Enter" to
install XP) on my Dell Dimension 4400 Desktop. Nor can it be found by the
Maxtor MaxBlast3 CD (message that no Maxtor drive can be found). Put the
drive into my firewire drive bay attached to my laptop with XP already
installed and not only does the BIOS detect it but so does XP but gives the
messasge "Windows cannot format this drive" when I attempt to format. Disk
Management software does show the drive as E: with a full 123 point
something partition (healthy). Anyone have any ideas? Has my Dell somehow
clobbered my new drive already? I have an old drive that I was replacing
because of exactly the same symptoms.

 

[Shenan Stanley]

Basic symptoms: New 120 gig hard drive (Maxtor 6Y120P). Is
recognized by BIOS by not by Windows XP Install CD (message to the
effect that it can't find a hard drive after getting the point
where I press "Enter" to install XP) on my Dell Dimension 4400
Desktop. Nor can it be found by the Maxtor MaxBlast3 CD (message
that no Maxtor drive can be found). Put the drive into my firewire
drive bay attached to my laptop with XP already installed and not
only does the BIOS detect it but so does XP but gives the message
"Windows cannot format this drive" when I attempt to format. Disk
Management software does show the drive as E: with a full 123 point
something partition (healthy). Anyone have any ideas? Has my Dell
somehow clobbered my new drive already? I have an old drive that I
was replacing because of exactly the same symptoms.

First, the SPAM you will start receiving at the given email address is NOT
from Microsoft and you should never open unexpected attachments and
Microsoft never send patches via email. Always MUNGE your email address
when posting to a worldwide distributed newsgroup.

Second, when installing Windows XP fresh on this machine - are you pressing
F6 and installing the driver needed for the drive/controller?
OR..
Is your BIOS setup to allow this drive to be the BOOT drive?

OR..

Is Windows XP already installed somewhere and updated with all Critical
patches and when you use "Disk Manager" and try to initialize the drive - is
it not there to initialize?

 

[Duh]

It's an ide drive, there are no drivers to install.

 

[Shenan Stanley]

It's an ide drive, there are no drivers to install.

In this case - likely true..
But the controller in question could have been anything.. Promise RAID
controller, etc - was not specified.

 

[DL]

If you were replacing a drive that exhibited the same symptoms it may tend
towards a mb problem