Windows not seeing new Hard Drive
 

I am after removing an old hard drive from my system (my D drive) and replaced it with a new one:
Maxtor 80GB ATA133 7200RPM
MX6Y080L0

The jumper settings are correct (slave), and when I power on the machine it is recognised by the bios.

But windows or dos cannot see it.

I have tried Add New Hardware on the control panel, but it finds nothing.

The hard drive did not come with any software or a manual.

I am running Windows 98

What do I have to do to install the hard drive?
I suppose I have to partition it or format it before I can use it. How do I do that?

is it formatted?

Sounds like it isn't.

Download Maxblast, and use it to get your new drive formatted. I had to look it up on the website. I always use Western Digital drives and they have similar software to do this. It only take a few minutes.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/dow.../maxblast3.htm

Yeah, I dowloaded and used that program to make a start-up disk.

I booted from that disk, and it started to work, the maxtor logo appeared, with the message "Loading files in memory"

Then it got an error, and exited with the message "Error: Files nested too deeply", and dropped me into dos.

any ideas?

The above guys are right, the drive isn't formatted. This happened twice in a row with me (with both of my new maxtor drives), and stumped me both times :)

find a copy of Maxblast and you'll be fine. Try to find a GUI-based Maxblast program, I know mine is. You just run it in Windows.

Download a slightly older version of the maxblast software and try again. It really is a good peice of software.
If you keep getting dropped to the c:/ promt, you might as well just use
format x:/
Where X is whatever drive leter bios gave the drive. However, using the dos format will format the drive in FAT or FAT32, so if you run XP, you will need to get the maxblast software working to format the drive to NTFS

*friggin A
It look like Maxtor has pulled the older versions of maxblast from their site. Try googling for them or looking through the readme for maxblast 3

A tip: if you use an 80 gig harddisk with Win98's FAT32 file system (you will be), divide the harddisk into two or more partitions. Fat32 does not work too well with partition sizes that are too big (>40 gig).

Ok, I downloaded and used a differend MaxBlast from that site, this one ran from within windows, and everything went smoothly.

Two questions:

1. Windows is reporting the size of the drive as 76.3GB. Why is this?

Is it because 1024 * 1024 * 76.3 =~ 80,000,000? or is there actually something wrong with this?

2. I did this before reading Dragonlich's post. How major are the problems with >40gig partitions? Is it worth my while to re-do it, as now would be the obvious time to do so, since the drive is empty.

Your 76.3GB partition is fine, leave it be now that you have it:p
HDD makers report their sizes as if the byte was 1000 not 1024. It's a slick little way that allows them to slightly inflate the size in ad's. You are correct that 76.3 is what you can get out of the drive since a block is 1024. If a block was 1000, the drive would be 80gb.

Unless your using graphics intensive (and I don't mean gameplay, I mean vector works) programs, your fine with one partition. Same goes unless your doing data intensivve work. In some cases of constant high load, having a single large partition creates a bottle neck from seek times. I can't see that applying to you though.

OK, great stuff! Thanks a lot for the help!

I've heard (not experienced) that large FAT32 partitions might introduce problems with data corruption. A colleague swears his problems with losing data were a direct result of the partitioning. He might be overstating the problem, but at least he knows quite a bit about computers (building them on a daily basis...)