Hard Drive, ...it no format.

[Syrillian]

Once upon a time,

I had a Dell Dimension 4600. I built a new system and recycled the Western Digital HDD into a secondary Test Rig. I installed Xandros on it. Now I would like to put XP back on it, but when I connect it to my primary Rig via an external enclosure XP doesn't recognize it in the My Computer window. The drive appears in the Device Manager, and is "functioning properly".

I want to format this drive so that I can install XP. I tried simply booting from the XP CD to install, but the system disregards the DVD/CD drive and goes to the HDD. I tried Boot Priority as the optical drive as 1st, it didn't work. I then disable all the IDE devices in the BIOS except the DVD/CD drive and the system still loaded the Xandros desktop.

So I thought, "Hey! I'll just connect this to my Rig's backup external enclosure and format it from there." - no way. I checked to see if the original back up drive had a jumper and what it was set to, there wasn't one, so I removed the jumper on the HDD that I am trying to install XP on.

Th drive is not recognized in MY Computer....

Anyone have any insight? Thanks for your time.

BTW - I have had the drive in question loaded w/ XP and connected to my primary Rig in the past (pre-Xandros).

 

[talldude123]

Try other cables. Sounds stupid, but the cables could be bad. Otherwise, i'd say the HD is dead. Can you hear it running at all?

 

[Vybuni]

I don't think you will be able to format the drive in XP because Windows doesn't recognise the Linux filesystems, but I'm not entirely sure. You can get a program like PartitionMagic, and format it from there. I just opened up PartitionMagic and it shows me all the partitions on my PC, including my Linux partitions.

How is your hard drive connected? USB? IEEE-1394?

 

[killians45]

one, check the jumper settings on the drive. If they're correct then you can try to debug the drive. Just write zeroes to it, that will solve any problems you might have with troublesome filesystems. Then, fdisk, format and reload.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Put the drive into your computer and unplug any drives with an OS like windows. Use a windows 98 boot floppy disk. And at the A: type FDISK and hit option 3 i think is i the one. delete any non dos partitions and then create a primary dos partition. Shut down your computer hook up your drives how you want them and reboot. The drive should show up now and you can format it now.

 

[FlashDude]

It is because it is formatted for Linux, but you should still be able to see the drive in computer managment. then delete the linux partitions and format the remaining space,,, done.

Edit,, This is a screenshot of one of my dual boots, your's should look the same. (computer management, storage, in administative tools)