Built this computer about 4 to 6 momths ago, has a 160 gig hd as master, recently added a 2nd hd 120 as a slave, but i cannot get a icon, it shows both hd's in the device manager. When this system was built I never partioned the 160 hd.
did you load xp from scratch or a recovery disc. if from scratch, xp partitioned & formatted the drive before it loaded itself onto your harddrive in NTFS. now you have to partition & format the 120gig for it to show up properly. all drives whether dos, win9x, nt, 2000 or xp have to be partitioned & formatted before software can be loaded on
Loaded xp from a disk onto a brand new 160 gig hd, never partitioned it & it only shows up in my computer as c drive all 160 gigs, it shows in the properties that 27.9 gigs used and 100 gigs free, does not show it as partitioned, the 120 gig hd shows nowhere in my computer but I can locate it from the device manager but cannot do anything with it. My computer also shows my 3-1/5 floppy as "A" DvD Burner as "D" My DvD Rom as my "E" a 512mb JumpDrive as "F" and a 128mb JumpDrive as "G". I'm also running 3 512/333/DDR memory sticks. As I have said I never partitioned my 160 gig hd and have never had any problems. I appr your help so far and do hope u can or someone can help me get this straighten out. Can I go back somehow and partition my 160 after all this time and if so "HOW" if this is possible then will this show the 2nd hd in "my computer" as a icon?
Hey!
To answer your question about the 160gb drive-no you can't partition the boot drive(drive with active operating system) using XP's utilities. You can use third party utilities like Partition Magic to get this done.You don't need to partition the 160gb drive unless you want to divide it into smaller drives. eg. divide into two 80gb or four 40gb.
As for the 120gb, you need to initialize and format before it shows up in 'My Computer'.
To do this:
Start
1.Right click 'My Computer'
2.Manage
3.under Storage click 'Disk Management'
you will find the new 120gb drive
4.Right click drive and click 'initialize'
It should give option to partition disk-if not
5.Right click drive and click Format
If it's the first time you've used 'disk management', a wizard may start--you can use this instead of above.
After you've done this the drive will show up in 'My Computer'.
The second 120gb can be partitioed using XP's 'disk management'--right click drive in disk management and click 'partition'.
Once again you only need to partition if you want seperate smaller drives-- say one to store documents and the other for movies.
I believe all hard drives are partitioned. There may be only one, but it's still a partition. I remember that fdisk always required a partition. It would ask if you wanted the whole disc to be one partition. Multiple disc partitions aren't so necessary with NTFS due to the smaller cluster size. I think you can make them as small as 500 bytes. I think the default size is 4KB.
