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    Help with external harddrive

    Discussion in 'Accessories' started by MrBamboo, Jul 6, 2006.

  1. MrBamboo

    MrBamboo Notebook Consultant

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    I bought a Seagate 250GB 7200RPM IDE 3.5'' internal HDD and a NexStar3 enclosure.

    Well installing the HDD inside the enclosure was very easy. and I plugged it on to my desktop via USB. It would initialize the harddrive. But it would not format it no matter what. I've tried the windows disk manager and ParititionMagic 8.0. Neither would work. I've done some research and found that winXP and certain motherboards/BIOS can't format harddrives 137GB+. but it seems everyone that's had this problem could atleast create one partition under 137GB with no problem. However when i try to make a single partion only 20GB in size it wouldn't format that either! I am clueless to what the problem is.

    I'm running winXP pro with SP2, all updates are, well up to date. my desktop uses a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard and has the latest BIOS (well its from 2004) Is it the harddrive itself that is broken? The harddrive is OEM so it didn't come with an IDE cable. So I can't plug it straight to the motherboard as a secondary drive and try format it like that. Any help is appreciated. Thanks

    edit: Oh yeah also I'm partitioning into NTFS. I'm trying to format just 20GB of it in FAT32 to see if that works

    edit2: yep, the FAT32 partition worked. but the NTFS won't even for 20GB. :-/ Why is that? Since you can't format FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB using winXP, this isn't really a solution, i dont want 7 32GB partitions ~_~
     
    MrBamboo, Jul 6, 2006
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  2. MrBamboo

    MrBamboo Notebook Consultant

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    ..... problem solved. switched to a 6 year old desktop with windows 2000. miraculously now it can format the entire drive in NTFS.

    how can microsoft manage to screw so many things up with winXP SP2? :(
     
    MrBamboo, Jul 6, 2006
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  3. tennisplayer121

    tennisplayer121 Notebook Geek

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    LOL... you actually have to ask how Microsoft can screw something up?
     
    tennisplayer121, Jul 6, 2006
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  4. MrBamboo

    MrBamboo Notebook Consultant

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    its not that. But they had it working in 2000! The first desktop I built in 2005! They've managed to LOSE technology that worked 5 years ago -_-
     
    MrBamboo, Jul 6, 2006
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  5. TedJ

    TedJ Asus fan in a can!

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    You don't think it's more likely that you have a hardware issue? If you had installed Win2K on the same hardware and it worked, only then could you say it was a WinXP problem.

    I believe that early revisions of the nForce2 mobo chipset had some issues with onboard USB.
     
    TedJ, Jul 6, 2006
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