HD Not detected?!

TheDean

TheDean

TheDean

Soldato
Joined
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Hi all,

Recently added a 1TB WD Caviar Green Power edition to my system. Vista x64 detects in and installs the driver software. It also appears by name in device manager and says it has installed correctly.
However - when I enter My Computer - It's not there?

What am I doing wrong?

Cheers
 
Ok - so if I go to Disk Management within control management in Control Panel it shows that my drive has not been assigned a drive letter, but the option for me to assign one is greyed-out. It is calling it 'Disc 0' and it displays a 'healthy (primary partition)' of 930.88GB, 133MB Unallocated, 384 Healthy (primary partition) and 133MB Healthy (primary partition)

Can anyone help as I really need to get all the data off the disc....:(
 
So this disk has been used before in another system?

Are you right clicking on the 930Gb area when the assign drive letter option is greyed out?

Was the drive previously formatted as a dynamic disk?
 
rpstewart said:
So this disk has been used before in another system?

Are you right clicking on the 930Gb area when the assign drive letter option is greyed out?

Was the drive previously formatted as a dynamic disk?
Click to expand...

The drive was previously used in a Synology disk station 107e to store media files on. Right clicking on the 930GB section still has the option greyed-out and to my knowledge it has not been used as a dynamic drive.
 
Don't those things format the internal drive as EXT3? If so that'll be the problem, there are Vista EXT3 drivers available if you have a google.
 
You may also need to initialise the drive by right clicking on the drive information in the manager. (I had to yesterday when adding a new drive).
 
Ok - I got all the files off I could using a program called Explore2fs, so thank you for leading me in the right direction rpstewart - I did actually think of you when I had this issue!!!

Will I be able to format the drive as normal prior to installing Xp onto it using the Xp set-up disc?
 
TheDean said:
Will I be able to format the drive as normal prior to installing Xp onto it using the Xp set-up disc?
Click to expand...
That's an interesting question. Probably yes but having never done it I can't be 100% sure. In theory it's just a plain primary partition formatted slightly differently so it shouldn't be difficult to reformat but I do remember in the dim and distant past having to use particular versions of fdisk to remove NTFS and HPFS formatted partitions because older versions didn't recognise the filesystems.
 
rpstewart said:
That's an interesting question. Probably yes but having never done it I can't be 100% sure. In theory it's just a plain primary partition formatted slightly differently so it shouldn't be difficult to reformat but I do remember in the dim and distant past having to use particular versions of fdisk to remove NTFS and HPFS formatted partitions because older versions didn't recognise the filesystems.
Click to expand...

Just if you were interested this worked fine and Xp was happily installed. Thank you all for your help, especially rpstewart :)
 
I know you've done this now, but for future reference - you can format drives like that yeah.. I've just done some myself. Basically you need to delete all the volumes off it and all the partitions too, to the point where you have a full drive of unallocated space. Then you just format it as per a new drive. Took me ages to figure that out too.. probably because I was being daft and reading into it too much but it all boiled down to deleting the unknown FS volumes first then the partitions.
 
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