Re: Hard Drive Problems

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Shenan Stanley (news_helper_at_hushmail.com)
Date: 04/11/04 

Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 16:36:45 -0500

George Ditmore wrote:
> 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? 

-- 
<- Shenan ->
--

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