I've added and extra hard drive because I'm always low on disk space but I can't get the PC to recognise the new drive. SATA 2 and 3 are greyed out and I don't know how to change it.
View 7 RepliesOn Windows XP I used WinRAR for my backups because the OS lacked a decent backup system. To my surprise with Vista I still use WinRAR for my backups as that OS doesn't seem to have a decent backup system either.
I want to backup files from internal drive C to a physically separate internal drive D. Drive D won't show up. What comes closest seems to be ''The location is either the system disk (the disk that Windows is installed on?also called the C drive) or the boot disk (the disk that Windows uses to start your computer?also called the startup disk)as Windows XP is installed on drive D.
The manufacturer of my PC provided me with a New Imaged Hard drive. My old drive was working fine except it had some pre-installed software on it that could not be removed and could cause conflicts. The manufactiurer wants the old Hard drive returned. The old drive has some senitive personal information on it so I am reluctant just to pack it up and return it.
I have done some research about how to wipe off all information on a Hard drive before donating a PC, etc......but all I have read is very complicated and I am not comfortable in proceedding following any of the processes. Keeping in mind, I am not erasing the Hard drive with my PC's OS on it, (although the Old drive still has an OS on it). I can connect the OLD drive as a 2nd Internal drive....and than proceed to Wipe it Clean before returning it.
Surely there must be an easy, simple process for someone with limited computer knowledge to wipe a 2nd Internal Hard drive clean of all data so that no one could access any information off that drive....
I just installed a new internal hard drive (SATA). I want to use this drive only for storage (not boot-up).
When I try to access it via "My Computer" the drive is not shown. When I try to find it in "Device Manager" it is not shown. When I try to set it up in the BIOS, that field is "read only"... I cannot highlight it to change it. I have made sure all cables are secure. I even swapped the power source of my existing hard drive with the new hard drive to ensure power is OK. How do I set up this hard drive? My PC is a Dell Inspiron 531S, running Windows Vista Home Edition 32bit.
I have 2 pcs one with xp pro, other is vista business 32bit on laptop. Using a 750gb samsung hd753Lj internal hard drive in a sumvision external enclosure with usb2 and e-sata connection, but i only have usb connection. ALl works fine on xp computer, but when i plug into vista i get the error in the system tray saying "usb device not recognised". In device manager it says "unknown device." have tried all 4 usb ports on laptop, have tried using it via mains powered usb hub and still no joy.
View 4 Replies View RelatedAm reinstalling Windows Vista after a virus infected my PC. I am reinstalling vista but after booting from DVD Vista does not recognise my SATA hard disk on the "Where do you want to install Windows?" screen. There are no issues with the hard disk and this happened once before but I can't remember how I solved this. My problem is the Vista installer not recognising my hard disk so I can install Vista. I have an Alienware pc with hitachi deskstar hard disk and asus a8n-sli deluxe motherboard. I have to reinstall as a virus has caused my windows explorer to malfunction and it also installed a trojan which stole my key. I have tried a couple of ASUS raid drivers via a usb hard disk with no luck. We can't find any appropriate hitachi drivers. I think this is related to the hard disk controller?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'm going to try and make myself as clear as possible. I have a HP laptop, which I bought a few months ago and when I first tried a CD that was burnt, a message came up that wrote: "Please insert a disc in drive E" and there was a disk in drive E. I brushed it off however because the next CD, which was an original, worked. Yesterday, I tried putting in The Sims 2 but again that message popped up and this CD was an original also. I've tried everything to try and solve this problem but nothing seems to work.
View 5 Replies View RelatedVista stopped recognising my DVDRW some time ago. I think it was after installing sp1. This is a known issue, dealt with under but after having tried the fix and having already restored recognition of my DVDRW drive I now find that I am back to square one. Vista won't recognise my DVDRW drive again. This time I can't use the fix - which involves deleting lines from a registry subkey - as they are already removed. I would be very grateful for any advice or ideas on how I can tackle this.
View 4 Replies View Relatedhey guys, this may seem like a stupid question but I am travelling and I cant really afford an external hard drive. I need to back up my laptop and reinstall windows... Is it possible to put evrything from C: onto D:, format C: and reinstall without losing anything off D:? I have a Toshiba Sattelite 600 with two 300GB hard disks, running vista home premium 32bit...
View 6 Replies View RelatedI am curious if Vista can be run from one of those portable external hard drives that I see in Staples, etc. rather than have to install another internal hard drive. I want to dual-boot with XP (already installed on an internal HD) and it would also be great if I can bring that external HD with us when we travel and hook it up to my wife's XP laptop and be able to boot up in Vista too. We need something for testing our software in Vista.
View 7 Replies View RelatedThe Hard Drive LED light on my Sony Vaio keeps blinking EVERY SECOND. When it's really quiet I can hear it too, it's constantly writing. Constantly. I did my research - read all the threads on the net and so far I have disabled:
Windows index
Windows defender
Windows search
Superfetch
System Restore
Readyboost
Defragmenter
I have uninstalled google desktop.
The system is totally virus and spyware free, and the anti-virus is not scanning (schedule scan disabled). All Vista updates are installed. Nothing has helped. I've run out of things to disable. I'm running Vista Business SP1, Dual Core 2.2 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM.
I have a ASUS laptop running Vista Home Premium, 64 bit OS. I have several programs that I use but no loner have the insall disks for. Should I have to reformat in the future I would hate to lose them. Here's what I'm thinking: Buy a extrenal hard drive. Seagate, 1Tbit, usb, cost $90.00. Copy my hard drive to it. If I need to reformat. Reinstall Vista from my recover disk that came with the computer. Then copy files from external drive. Bingo. All my old programs would be there and working. Question is: Can this be done?
What file/folders do I need to copy to the external drive?
Is it possible to copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Vista Premium, all the data, etc. and what would be a good software to accomplish this?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have an external hard drive, I reformated it so I could use Vista's backup.Now it seems that when my brother inlaw tries to put some music files(Itunes) that the hard disc is unavailable to his computer. At this stage it seems that Vista has conned me into destroying a perfectly good WD harddrive!I have created a second partion on the hard drive and I am reformatting that, as I write this, but the only formatting option seems to be this NTFS, and that is what I had already formatted the ExtHD to so I think this formatting will be to no avail!From what I can figure I need to format into FAT but I tried a quick format an ex-fat option was there, but the problem was the same. I am becoming more frustrated with Vista, seems I just keep running into things that should be simple and aren't!
View 4 Replies View Relatedwhen booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
View 9 Replies View RelatedDoes 'Local Disc' D mean it is a drive inside my machine or could it be my external hard drive?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI was wonder if anyone know a solution for the following problem. I have a ethernet hard drive and I've never had a problem until using vista and windows server 2008. both operating systems are unable to browse the drive, instead it completely crashes explorer.exe. Windows server 2003 & XP have never had trouble.
View 6 Replies View Relatedi bought a kit for an old hard drive. i got it to work once ealier today, and now it doesn't work. when i plug it into the usb, it will not successfully install. the kit is a rocketfish hd 35, the hard drive is seagate u8 model st313021a. the "remove hardware" icon appears in the tray, but no designated lettered drive appears on the computer.
the hard drive was part of an older tower that i couldn't get to boot. it's strange because just today i accessed the hard drive and located old pictures, music and other files that i hadn't seen in a few years. had i known this would have happened i would have started saving right away. i thought i had it working.
I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new 500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive was left in for additional storage. Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk. There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the 500GB disk?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
View 5 Replies View RelatedRecently this unit is not recognising pre-recorded or formatted discs which it previously had recognised. I have a HP laptrop and the drive is a matshita DVD-RAM UJ-850S ATA. I have tried deleting and reinstalling the driver with no success. In one of the forums it is suggested that the 'UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" in the HKEY registry be deleted but I am not sure about doing this without someone in the know gives it their OK.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI've just received a new computer from Dell. In it, is 1 1Tb HDD. My old Dell had 2 500Gb HDDs, which were mirrored across a RAID array. The idea being is that I had a copy of literally every piece of data I owned, so should something go wrong on one HDD, I wouldn't lose everything. In a bid not to lose everything, I rescued one of the 500Gb HDDs from my departing Dell PC (I got given a free upgrade due to ongoing technical issues involving my original computer) and have stuck it in my new PC.
It's connected via SATA cables, and has a power supply in to it as well, only windows doesn't seem to recognise this new drive. It's quite literally invisible. As one can imagine, this makes retreiving any data one may wish to recover exponentially more difficult. My old HDD was being run on a 32-bit Vista system, whereas my new system is 64-bit Vista.
I have Windows XP and Vista. I always go through "safely remove hardware" before pulling off USB drive on XP. However, I have been trying to do the same on Vista, it seems that I cannot do the same as XP. For instance, I plug in my USB on Vista and it appears as H drive on Vista, when I am ready to do "safely remove hardware", I don't see the device drive H is on the "Safely remove hardware" window, so I cannot stop the H drive. I am concerned about the Vista hardware.
View 5 Replies View Relatedi have an older maxtor 250gb ide hard drive and i am trying to put it in my computer so i can reformat it and install vista ultimate, the thing is when i go to disk manager i can see the drve, feel the drive, but it wont let me initialize it or anything, it comes up as "the request could not be performed because of an I/O devise error, the disk was originally in my modded xbox and i could acces it with xp.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have a new pc with only 256MB of RAM- how hard is it to add memory? Also, how do I find out how many GB the hard drive is?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI purchased a new hard drive and named it NEW-BACKUP. I did a exact disk copy from my old BACKUP drive. My wife uses the old drive now. I have renamed my new drive to BACKUP. I am doing complete system backup's pretty frequently. To verify that the backups are happening, I typed in the command "wbadmin get versions" and got a list of the backups. The disk name showed up as "NEW-BACKUP". "NEW-BACKUP" is the destination drive for the backup and renamed as "BACKUP.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI just inserted a SD/MMC Card in my laptop, and it changed my external hard drive letter from F to G?, how can I change it back to F again?, as I had everything setup on the FRIVE, now nothing recognises it?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI just installed a new hd WD500g sata to my box. Vista "sees" the new hd in device manager, but doesnt see it in "my computer. It is freshly installed and straight out of the bubble wrap,I was thinking gee, maybe it needs formatted...but i dont see that option anywhere...maybe im missing something.... i donno...first time i've run into this....usually the drives are "seen" right away.....
View 2 Replies View RelatedWhat is the best way to add a partition to a hard drive in safe mode or in normal mode.
Thanks in advance.
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I
restart the system with it plugged in.
So while it's not a big issue,it is an annoyance.