Installing New Hard Drive - Partitioning And Drive Letter Issues
Nov 22, 2009
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
not being computer literate , i am having a problem with a new hard drive . i took out the old one . i have the windows disc and product codes , but i can't get it to boot to start the windows installation. i have done it on another computer , and the disc begins installing windows on start up. i have tried starting the computer with the disc in place , and without it . obviously , i must be missing something to get it started . the disc is brand new .
I had to reinstall XP because of spyware issues. I saved important data on my slave drive. I reinstalled XP. Now the bios, device manager, and disk manager recognizes the slave drive but didn't assign it a drive letter. In disk manager it shows as a basic disk, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 18.65 GB,Online. When I right click the volume to assign a drive letter it is grayed out.
Problem is after reinstalling xp on a new hard drive my second drive only shows up in disk management does not show up in my computer .It has all my stuff on it from my old drive so really need teh info on it badly.But under disc manmgement where it shows up healthy with no drive letter everything is blanked out except delete partition.
I have been reading past messages regarding partitioning a drive.I understand why it's done and am interested in doing this myself. The question I have is my computer came with xp already installed so I have no disc to work with.The computer was of course set with the c drive being large, do I just partition the rest of the available space? If so what is the best way to go about this?I have seen programs recommended and also talk of first needing to make the c drive smaller to start with, but have no idea how I can do this since I am starting after the fact.If someone could explain to me how I might best go about this it might help me put all I've read into perspective. I definitely don't want to mess anything up.
I'm partitioning an external hard drive that's connected to my Win XP machine. I set an 80GB partition for XP (NTFS). When I tried to allocate the rest of the drive as a FAT32 partition (for my Win98 machines), FAT32 was not an option, until I reduced the partition size to 20 GB. I'm using XP's Disk Management. Is there a maximum limitation of FAT32 partition size?
Recently I installed Ubuntu Linux on a partition on my secondary hard drive (it's a worthwhile education, I'll give it that). Since then, when in Windows, the remaining space, used for games, alternates between being accessible and being unaccessible. What's the go?For example, when I go in My Computer and try to open D: drive this is the message i receive:D: is not accessible The parameter is incorrect.
Is there a way to partition the primary disk on a computer without reformatting?A computer that I inherited (HP Pavillion) has a 120Gb hard drive partitioned into two sections C drive 104Gb NTFS primary D drive 7Gb FAT32 recovery I would like to split the primary into two sections, if possible without reformatting
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home. I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do. I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
I have 2 drives, one with Windows and such, and the other with about 1,000 games that my girlfriend plays. She let her grandson on, unsupervised, and the next thing is a trashed system drive. Unfortunately, there was no way to save it, so I did a format and clean reinstall of XP Home. Goback was on the drive, and there was no way to uninstall it before the reinstall. The reinstall went fine, but the GAME drive is virtually inaccessible. It doesn't show in My Computer, but does show in Admin Tools, Disk Management. However, the drive name is shown as F(F. It should either be D: or F: ( there are 2 optical drives). I can't change the name or drive letter. I get the error "the drive is locked".
I tried Partition Magic, and it will change the info, temporarily. Also, PM shows the drive as *.F It doesn't give any error message, and says the change has been applied, but it obviously hasn't. I searched this forum for "hard drive locked" and followed suggestions that I had not tried previously. The smiley replaced a colon; the entry should read F(F. Sometimes I think I might know what I'm doing, and then I realize, maybe not.
I have WXP Home, a 160gb HD. Asus Motherboard. I partitioned the C drive with Paragon 9 and moved all my data to the D drive due to some problems and had to format and reinstall windows on the C drive. when I finished and rebooted I could access everything. A short time later I could not access the D Drive, the error message said that I did not have permission. No explanation, Just locked out. I can access folders on the D drive if I search for a folder then copy them across from the search window into the C Drive, or if I boot into Safe Mode. That is no good. I need access from My Computer by clicking on the D Drive Icon. Any suggestions.
My office has a number of mapped network drives for each user which, unfortunately, start at drive letter F.Each time a USB device is used on the computer it is also automatically assigned the drive letter F (presuming that C is hard disk and D and E are CD/DVD drives). This has to be manually changed from within Disk Management.Apparently this is as a result of physical drives taking precedent over the mapped network drives.Is there any workaround for this other than moving the mapped drive letters further along in the alphabet? - this is not really a feasible solution at this time.
I installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
After reformating my pc, my secondary hard drive is now designated as drive "D". Before the reformat it was drive "G". I have software that needs to get data from drive "G" but the drive is not designated as "G" any longer. I can't remember how to reassign the drive letters so that I can designate the secondary drive as "G".
My external drive has always been "E" and I have several desktop shortcuts that relate. Recently I inserted a flash drive containing home movies and after viewing and a reboot later I noticed that my external drive is now shown as "New Volume F". I would like to change it back to "E"
A laptop has 5 mapped drives which are only used on the office. Offline files is not an option. When a user on the road clicks on a mapped drive by mistake, the explorer window locks up while it tries to find it.
Instead of doing something sensible like taking the explorer window to C: drive or desktop, it goes to the next drive letter. Of course this is also unavailable. So the machine is essentially unusable for about 5 minutes if the user mis-clicks once.
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
On our WinXP systems (SP1 & 2), when users attempt to us usb flash drives, sometimes the O/S tries to assign an already used network drive letter to the device, making it unaccessible. Of course, the non-admin users can't use drive manager to change the drive letter. Is their a way around this problem?
Win XP Pro, USB 1.1 in front, 2.0 card added to PCI slot.I can put in a jump drive or a flash memory card reader and hear the XP bong, it does the new software found and says it's available, but It does not show on 'my computer'.I can go to manage, disk drives, and see it. I can right click and assign a drive letter, but still does not appear on 'my computer'.I can still open it after assigning a drive letter in 'manage' and read/write files from a new window.I'm suspecting BIOS? It was a machine I upgraded to XP Pro.
I am buying a new PC and was wodering what I have to do to install my existing hard drive in to my new computer. I was told the new install of XP will have problems with the old hard drive.
I have a Dell Dimension 2400 desktop computer that I want to install a 2nd hdd. My sister gave me her computer (which is the same exact as mine). Her's was hit by lightening, she thinks. The motherboard was fried. I'm wanting to use her 40gb hd as a 2nd hdd in my computer.My question is: Will I have to do a clean install on her hdd? I don't want to do anything that would damage my good drive.If I install her drive in my computer and make it a slave in the bios, will that be all I have to do?
I been haveing trouble installing xp pro on my hard drive. I am able to get through the windows install, computer reboots then starts the process all over again starting from the blue screen.I've tried setting the cdrom as the first bootable drive but this does not do the trick.my pins are correct on my 160 gig drive. I don't know what else to do.
basically I need to know how to make a pc boot from the HD and install XP by copying the XP CD to the HD. Details & reason below:I've formatted the hard drive on a a friends emachine (by putting the HD into my machine) due to mess with viruses etc.Put HD back into e machine and tried to install XP from an OEM XP CD (genuine windows) - it boots and starts install, copying files to the hard drive fine but when it reboots it doesn't continue the install, but just goes back to the start, wanting to copy the files again.So what I'm going to do is put the HD back in my machine, copy the XP CD to a partition on the HD and then put it back in the machine, boot from HD and install XP all from HD. Question is- how do I get it to boot from the hard drive and start the install?I don't have a floppy boot disk or a floppy drive on my machine to make floppy boot disk. I can set the machine to boot from the HD 1st, that's no problem, just don't know how to set up the HD to let it boot from that so I can run the windows install which will be on the partition on the HD.
before I install the new hard drive making this new drive the boot drive which will be replacing my existing "C" drive how I by to do this, my system is Compaq Presario with Windows XP Home Edition and has Drive "C" with 20GB, Drive "D" (which is the SYSTEM SAVE DRIVE) with 18GB, Slave Drive "G" with 98GB and I made a partition on this drive which is Drive "H" with 15GB, the new drive that I want to install is a Seagate with 120 GB.
My error is BSOD "Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated."it tells me to run chkdsk /f, but then I try that switch and it tells me that it is an invalid switch.
A few days ago my hard drive crapped the bed so I bought a new one. I was wondering if I should do something different than what I was gonna do. I have the original Dell Windows XP SP1 cd that came with my Dell computer. I am going to install it on my new hard drive. After I do this should I go to www.microsoft.com and download the SP2 or should I do something different altogether? I just wanna make sure I have all the windows security updates on the new hard drive.
Hi Folks, I have a Dell Optiplex GX240 running Windows XP Pro with 512MB memory. I currently have a 40GB hard drive in there. I want to know if it can handle a 250GB hard drive. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I'm considering the Western Digital Hard Drive.
I had to install a new hard drive on my laptop. It has windows xp. That installed ok and now I can't get my wireless to work. It says "No active network adapters". It is not plugged into the ethernet, my home computer is. I usually just get on my laptop in another room with the wireless that is built into the computer.
I need to reformat the 60Gb drive on my laptop and I would like to partition my hard drive to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. I wanted to put XP Home in one partition and my docs on another. 1. Would 10Gb for the 1st / XP partition and the remainder for the second partition seem reasonable?
2. I will put the MyDocuments folder on the 2nd partition - do I try and install all programs on the 2nd partition, right? The 'Documents and Settings' folder sits on the 2nd partition also, right? I think I want to keep Windows away from everything, to keep it 'pure'.
3. Will any programs try to deposit temporary files application data in the 1st partition - and do I then shift this data over to the 2nd partition?
My Maxtor External Drive became corrupted and I needed to re-format the drive. Unfortunately, while Working in Windows XP I accidentally deleted the partition and the drive. Now I can't get Windows XP to recognize the Maxtor Drive. I tried re-booting the PC and plugging in the Maxtor USB Cable, but this did not work. The Maxtor Drive was my H: Drive. Can get Windows to recognize my Maxtor Drive? When I deleted the drive I was working in the "Computer Management" Screen. I navigated to this screen through the following path: Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management.
