XP won't recognize a hard drive

[kramlavud]

Just installed another small 8GB hard drive on my old PC. The device manager has it listed, and says it is working properly, but an icon does not show up in 'My Compter'. Can anyone help me?

Mark

[KirkVining]

Sounds like it has been detected, so your CMOS setup must be right - did you manually enter the sectors, cylinders, etc or does your computer detect these settings automatically? If all that is correct, which sounds like it is, then the next thing you need to do is right mouse click My Computers, choose Manage, then in left window of window that appears click Storage, click Disk Management. Then look in the right window. You should see a grpahic map of your available hard disks. If this is an additional disk, you will see Disk 1, and it will be marked as "unrecognized". Right mouse click in the box to the right of this, choose mark partion as active. After that, repeat that step and choose format. Format it as NTFS.

[kramlavud]

Kirk,
Did as you instructed, but formatting stopped at 57%. A little yellow triangle with an excalmation point appead over the drive icon and also the words (errors) and (at risk). Could this old Wester Digital HD be defective?
Mark

[KirkVining]

If its an old "Caviar" they were pretty crummy drives. Does it give you the option of continuing? If not, you need to use Norton Disk Doctor to run a surface scan - ifyou don't have you can use chkdsk. Has XP assigned a drive letter to the disk?

[KirkVining]

Also, are you sure you have the flat cable seated well in the sockets? Its not you can get problems like this too. Check both ends and make sure its not cocked to one side in the socket.

Do you have the jumper settings correct?

[kramlavud]

Kirk
XP now calls it 'F', as far as i can tell it should be 'F'.

MedMec,
Cable is seated firmly.

All,
Have loaded a few mB on 'F' and so far so good. I'll watch it closely.

Thanks to all.

Mark

[KirkVining]

What model computer do you have? Does it have an automatic drive detect in the Setup or did you have to enter the sectors and cylinders etc?

Assuming tha it automatically detected your hard drive:

If it assigned a drive letter you should be able to run a surface scan usig chkdsk. Click Start, Run type in CMD in the box, click ok. type chkdsk f: /x /r

Hit enter and let it run. This should lock out any bad sectors. Reboot the computer when it finishes, and then retry the format.

If you had to manually enter the sector info, recheck everything you entered.

[kramlavud]

Kirk,

Results of chkdsk on 8 GB hard drive are:
Added 12493 bad clusters to bad cluster file
8,249,242 KB total disk space
238,244 KB in 1920 files
484 KB in 96 indexes
49,972 KB in bad sectors
46,015 KB in use by system
43,296 KB occupied by the log file
7,914,628 KB available on dusk.

Have not tried to reformat, and will watch how this drive acts over the next days.

Thanks for your help,

Mark

[KirkVining]

It is not a good drive. I don't know what you are going to use it for, but I would back it up regullarly.