hard drive problems

[themanwhowas]

hi guys

i have a 160gb hard drive with windows xp installed. i have accidently formatted this hard drive like 6 times, which erased my ghost images. idiot. i bought a 2nd hard soley to store my ghost image's onto. it is a 40gb seagate barracuda. after much hassle i managed to physically install the hard drive ok (the power leads from the motherboard were too short. whats the point in that?) and i ran partition magic from the boot discs. the hard drive showed the correct size and showed that it was unformatted so i formatted the hard drive into fat32 which worked fine. after i rebooted into windows, i went into 'my computer' to check out my new drive on the drives list. when i clicked on properties it said that the drive was 8gb and unformatted. it gave me the option to format which i did. since then, if i run partition magic through windows it is labelled 'BAD' and 8gb. if i try to use partition magic through the rescue discs it does not recognise the 2nd hard drive at all. i have checked my CMOS while booting which displays the correct size for my 2nd hard drive. i have used a partition magic tool called partition info which shows my 2nd hard drive and shows some errors which i dont understand. while loading the gui it gives me 3 warnings:

disk errors
disk geometry errors
partition errors

i have uploaded a picture of the partition info page here - http://www.hairyfish.bravehost.com - if anyone would care to take a look. i would very much appreciate any help as i am lost. my 2nd hard drive is the slave btw.

update -- just checked my CMOS again. it now says slave not installed. i removed the hard drive, booted into windows, shut down, reinstalled hard drive, checked CMOS. CMOS detected the hard drive and said the correct hard drive size. after booting into windows the same problem occured. after i rebooted my computer the CMOS no longer recognises my 2nd hard drive. wtf is going on?

[HaroldW]

I suggest you try using the XP "Disk Management" utility to partition and format the drive. It is built into XP and specifically designed for this purpose.

[greengoose1]

In addition what file system are you using with XP on the 160 HDD? NT and Fat 32 conflict.

[tnmatt]

win xp can run on a fat 32 but an ntfs drive is much better. less virus options, better allocated space. it sounds as if your partition magic has corrupted your original mbr and replaced it with a generic one. Also if you convert ntfs to fat 32 you will lose space. perhaps raid 5 with a matrix will prevent future data loss. Winxp is a much better and reliable partition manager than partition magic.

[photolady]

Since this thread is over a year old, I'm closing it.

Please don't open older dated threads. Most members who have posted that long ago have already found their answers or have moved on and/or are no longer visit VDR.