T1B

so I bought a new 300g hard drive. when I went to install it, the software had me partition it into a 137GB hard drive. and it told me I could partition the rest later. so how do I do that?

run the software again.
Tha should give you options

na I went to the seagate web site. it said right click on my computer go to manage, and then disk management and i could partition it there. not to bad. thanks though..

however I still have a probelm.. the new drive is serial sata. before replacing the drive that died (it was ata 16 pin) so now that i have every thing running on the 300gb hd, I cant get the computer to recognize the old drive with all my data backed up. so how do I get the old info off the drive?

never mind girls.. I went into the bios and changed the boot order. worked like a charm.. Sweetness!

so i reistalled my old drive formated it and ran numerous XP disk checking software, and none say there are any problems.. does any one know of any other tests I can run to try to isolate the trouble?

peter dragon wrote:.. does any one know of any other tests I can run to try to isolate the trouble?

What trouble? I thought you fixed it.

im trying to fix the drive that I replaced. I was thinking about getting one of those swell hard drive enclosures. and making my self a external harddrive for the laptop

peter dragon wrote:im trying to fix the drive that I replaced. I was thinking about getting one of those swell hard drive enclosures. and making my self a external harddrive for the laptop

Before anyone can tell you what is wrong with the drive, much less how to fix it, you might want to detail what symptoms you're seeing.

Yeah, you started with "My hard drive died, so I bought a 300gb drive..."

Apparently it didn't die if you are able to see its contents with the new drive/windows install. Sounds like the problem could of been a bad boot partition or you lost some portion of the disk and it wasn't being detected as a bootable disk so you went and purchased another drive. We did recently have a drive at work in a laptop that seemed to have died, but after we took it out, put it into an external enclosure, backed it up and put it back in the laptop without doing anything else, it booted up no problem. Sounds like the problem was with the connection and re-seating it fixed the problem. Not saying thats your problem, but obviously weird things do happen.

As far as formatting your other part of your 300GB drive goes, you would do that from the Computer Management console. The way to get there is either find your My Computer icon and right click with the mouse and choose Manage OR go to Start, Control Panel and then find Administrative Tools and open the Computer Management program. Once the MMC is open, Look for the Disk Management option on the left side. You'll see all your disks in there. On your 300Gb drive, you'll see your Windows partition already formatted and the rest just sitting there. Click on the unformatted part, right click and choose create partition. Then just Quick format it with NTFS and you are good to go.

As far as testing a 'damaged drive' you can run check disk or you can go to the manufacturer's website and see if you can find a disk utility from them. They have testers specifically for their disks that should do a good job. If it comes back with OK, then just go to Best Buy and purchase an empty external enclosure and you are finished.