formatting hard drive

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ry4n

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I recently built my first PC, and I planned on using an existing hard drive that I have as a secondary drive in the new machine. So my plans were to:

1) copy existing Windows XP partition (along with everything else on the drive, which is a 120GB Western Digital) to an older, but still functioning 40GB Western Digital.

2) re-use the 40GB in the old machine, and put the 120GB in the new machine

My problem is this: Windows is not allowing me to format the 40GB drive, even though there is nothing on the drive (it used to have mp3s only, which I have already transferred from the drive). It gives me an error message; "The drive, D: cannot be formatted". this happens both when doing a quick format and the regular format.

What would cause this? I am certain the drive is fine. Even teh SMART tab in speedfan gives it a 96% health and 100% performance. Is there any other way to go about formatting the drive? Shareware?
 
Do you have it in the case by itself with no other drives? Try that, put in the cd, and see if you can format it then. If you did do that, then why is the computer calling it drive D:? Shouldn't that be the cd drive?
 
I haven't tried using it by itself. My initial goal was to use Norton Ghost to swap the C drive to the other one. I suppose I could try to format with the XP setup disk, but I'd like to be able to transfer the user accounts, settings and program files from one drive to the other.
 
well I was able to format and partition the drive using Norton Partition Magic. However, after using Norton Ghost to copy the 120GB drive to the 40GB drive (successfully), my computer states "Operating system not found" when trying to boot from it.
 
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