[Rictor]

I'm installing a second hard-drive. I have it set up as a slave, and BIOS recognizes it as such during start-up. However, Windows dudn't see jack squat. I'm probably forgetting something really obvious, but I can't for the life of me figure out what.

Help.

[an0n]

Format?

[Rictor]

I don't have a bootable floppy + fdisk.

[an0n]

You should (I think) be able to fdisk from the C drive to do the D drive, with it being a seperate physical drive and all.

[Taristin]

I had this prob too. A freash windows install will bring it up.

[an0n]

You tried playing with the Device Manager thing and Add Hardware?

[Rictor]

Yeah, I have, and the auto-detect craps out at the end, while for some odd reason they don't have Western Digital in the manual select list.

Also, fdisk only shows a single drive, which is kind of off given that I see both a master and a slave during startup.

raa: I don't have Windows handy, and besides I'm not interested in installing anything....hmm, the Win98 CD probably has fdisk, that might work.

[Thorn]

Try putting it on the other IDE channel.

[Rictor]

phsically impossible, given the space between my cdrom and my hardrives.

I'll try formatting with the windows cd. Wish me luck gentelmen.

[Turnsky]

get your hands on a win98 boot disk... it has Fdisk on it, the second HD quite possibly needs partitioning. format usually follows that..

or any other partitioning software should do.

[Vertigo1]

NO!

Do NOT re-install windows.  That is by far the STUPIDEST suggestion ever.  If you're running NT/2000/XP, then just do the following.  It will make your day brighter, and save yourself hours of program re-installations.

Start -> Control Panel -> Administrator Tools -> Computer Management

Click on "Disk Management" and locate your new hard drive in the list.  Check to see if there is a partition listed on the drive.  If not, simply create one, format it, and then restart windows.

If you're running Win9x, simply use the software provided by Western Digital (also downloadable from their website) and all will be well.

I swear people, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't bother even posting a suggestion.

[an0n]

Blow me.

[Rictor]

Vertigo: thanks, but I'm on 98.

OK, its formatting, but the maximum partition size it 10gigs, for an 80 gig hard-drive.

Its enough for now, I'll do it properly tommorow by the light of day.

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Rictor
Vertigo: thanks, but I'm on 98.

OK, its formatting, but the maximum partition size it 10gigs, for an 80 gig hard-drive.

Its enough for now, I'll do it properly tommorow by the light of day.

How old is the system you plugged it into?  Your motherboard may need a bios update.  You can get around it for now with a dynamic overlay, but thats not exactly the most favorable option.

HOWEVER, as I suggested in my previous post, download the latest release of Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard Utillities" and use it to partition and format your hard drive.  If that recognizes your 80 gig drive like its supposed to, then ignore the suggestion about a bios update for your motherboard.

Anon: Oh do grow up.  I do this **** for a living, and it irritates the **** out of me when morons give rediculously bad advice.  As if "reinstalling windows" is the solution to every damn problem that arises.

[Rictor]

Tell that to my super for whom I just spent 4 hours "fixing the computer" culminating in the reinstallation of Windows (OEM mind, so it was just a ghost image) to get rid of a tiny error. Kind of behind on the rent, so I only thought it fair.

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Rictor
Tell that to my super for whom I just spent 4 hours "fixing the computer" culminating in the reinstallation of Windows (OEM mind, so it was just a ghost image) to get rid of a tiny error. Kind of behind on the rent, so I only thought it fair.

$5 says that "tiny error" was an adware/malware infestation b0rking up windows.

Hell, I just recently cleaned out a Dell for a friend of mine and found 997 pieces of adware, some of which was causing Explorer to crash randomly.  Once I cleaned that out, all was well.  She was a very happy camper.

[Bobboau]

mycomputer->right_click->manage->format

oh, wait, you'r not running XP,
if it's still giveing you the 10 gig thing, what file format are you useing?

[Rictor]

Try to figure this one out

Every time the computer restarts, a message shows up saying file something.dll is missing from the windows/system 32 folder. However, this filename is always different (each time you restart) and none of them can be found by Googling, not even a single match. Maybe its randomly generated?

Also, the time the file was created, accessed and modified is all within 30 seconds of a reboot.

In the end, it was just too much bother, and since there was nothing really too irreplaceable on the comp...

[Rictor]

SUCCESS!!

And the drive now has 74 gigs free space on it...hmmm...I distinctly remember something around 10 gigs as being the only partition (I have no idea what file system, I was just running through it as quick as possible).

Next step: reinstall KOTOR and download prOn.

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Rictor
Try to figure this one out

Every time the computer restarts, a message shows up saying file something.dll is missing from the windows/system 32 folder. However, this filename is always different (each time you restart) and none of them can be found by Googling, not even a single match. Maybe its randomly generated?

Also, the time the file was created, accessed and modified is all within 30 seconds of a reboot.

In the end, it was just too much bother, and since there was nothing really too irreplaceable on the comp...

You know, that happened to my brother's computer a while back.  I scanned it with both AdAware SE and Spybot Search & Destroy and found a few malware installs.  I removed them, and replaced the missing DLL file from one of the windows CAB files and all was well.

Anywho, I'm going to bed.  I'm running on about 3 hours of sleep, so if you have any questions Rictor, bug me on ICQ sometime tomorrow. (UIN should be in my profile)