New Hard Drive Hell (1 Viewer)

[Chris Svencer]

I just got a new maxtor 60gb drive as my second HD in my computer, but windows doesn't like it. I have Fdisked it and the bios and windows both find the drive. But as soon as the little new hardware icon in the bottom right (winXP) comes up it goes to the good old blue screen of death with dumping physical memory and all that jazz (I can't read the details because it reboots to fast). I can make it to My Computer before it crashes, and I see the drive in there. But as soon as that hardware icon comes up it is toast. Any suggestions? This is kind of annoying that windows' built in features are screwing me over some how.
Thanks for the help.
-Svence

 

[DougKuhn]

How many watts is your power supply? You might have a power issue there.

How about your master/slave jumpers on the two drives. Are they set correctly?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Make sure the physical connections to the drive are secure (doesn't hurt to re-seat them).

Go back into FDISK and delete the partition(s) you've created, then boot into Windows. It's possible that XP is finding something screwy with the partition layout (unlikely but possible). If Windows works OK, you can create the partition(s) from there anyway.

If it still complains, I'd say you probably have a faulty drive.

 

[LewB]

Are there any jumpers on the drive (and your primary drive also for that matter) ? They are usually located near the cable connections. Perhaps you need to adjust the jumpers for a 'master/slave' arrangement ? Either that or you fdisked the drive to something other than NTFS, which is what I think XP is looking for.

 

[Chris Svencer]

Doug-
I have the WD drive (with XP and everything else) as the master and the Maxtor as the slave. The power supply is 350 watts which should be enough but just incase I ran the computer with just the two HD's no CD-ROMs hooked up and still crashed.

Rob-
Checked all the drive connections and they looked secure, even hooked it up to its own IDE cable, seperate from the WD. Tried it with no FDISK and windows still crashes and doesn't even see it in My Computer either.

Is there someway it could just be a windows bug? I don't understand why it works fine in My Computer (asks me to format) but then tries to install it and crashes. Thanks for the suggestions.
-Svence

 

[DougKuhn]

Chris,

350 is enough...that is for sure. Hmm. This is strange. If I am not mistaken...XP should not be seeing the HDD as a new piece of hardware via the hardware wizard. No? I recently re-installed XP on my main box and did not have my slave drive installed at the time. Once the install was complete...I plugged the drive in and did not see the hardware wizard. XP has to be thinking it is something else.

I would FDISK the drive again...do not format it and see what happens as Rob mentioned. XP should take care of it.

Although, this may be a little off the wall...how is the airflow in the box? That extra drive is going to up the heat in the case...so that might be a factor here too....but I would not pin this on the BSOD's though....but they are a symptom of over heating.

 

[Tekara]

try getting your hands on another copy of Fdisk, I had a drive have problems because of a faulty Fdisk program, windows would come up with some strange errors because of it too.

head over to http://www.bootdisk.com and get their 98se bootdisk and load up into dos and do your Fdisking.

 

[Chris Svencer]

Finally.....
Figured it out. Was able to slip in a Quick Format through windows before it crashed and all is fine now.
I guess windows just wanted to format it itself. Thanks for all the quick responses guys.
-Svence

 

[Rob Gillespie]

You shouldn't need to use FDISK at all. You can set up the partitions from Windows XP.

Until the partition is formatted it wont appear in My Computer. You have go into Computer Management and then into Drive Management.