Installed the HD but can't use it

[Caple]

Another annoying thing that I don't know what to do :/

I bought a SATA HD for me and sold my Samsung 120gb IDE to a woman who works with me. I went to her house to install the HD yesterday but couldn't do it.
She has a Duron or Athlon (don't remember) with an Asus A7S333 motherboard. Her old Quantum Fireball is set as primary master and I set the Samsung as primary slave. On secondary cable she has a CD drive and a DVD-RW drive.
I turned it on and the HD was found on the boot, as primary slave, as I set. Windows XP loaded and found the new device. The message that everything was ready to use appeared. But, there is always a "but", the HD does not appear on Windows Explorer or Disk Manager.
Before I remove it from my computer I deleted the partitions and I'm not sure if I created a new one (on NTFS format) or left that way, without any partition.
She uses WinXP on FAT32 system and I think it wouldn't prevent me from seeing the HD on the disk manager.
Any idea about what I can do?
Thanx in advance.

Bruno

[lumis]

that is pretty odd..

you could try converting the primary master to ntfs, it would only take a couple of minutes and no data loss occurs (unless something seriously weird happens)..

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/convertfat.mspx

what surprises me the most is that windows detects the drive, but doesnt show it in the disk manager.. i've installed linux formatted hdd's and disk manager recognized them even though it wasnt able to use them unless i formatted them to something windows would like.

does she have admin privleges in the account you logged on with?

you might try doing it through safe mode logging in as administrator.

[pchan]

Go to control penal > administrative tools > computer management. Under storage, select disk management. If you can see the Samsung HD, just do a quick reformat. Make sure you know exactly that is the Samsung drive that you have installed before you right click and re-format the Samsung drive.

[Caple]

lumis: I didn't know I could convert it to NTFS without losing data. I believe she has administrator status, but I forgot to check that.

pchan: the HD is not there. That's the weird thing.

[bgclarke]

Was the Samsung a boot drive when you were using it?

If so, that might be part of the problem. You may need to turn off the boot flag/active partition indicator.

No matter though, I would think that it should be at least showing up in the disk management console.

[Caple]

It was not a boot drive. :/

[bgclarke]

I recall having a similar problem with one of my PCs where I had a mix of hard drive vendors.

I think in order to get both drives detected, I had to take the slave jumper off of the slave drive in order for them to work together (I think it was a Samsung drive as well).

But in your case the BIOS found the slave, and Windows installed the driver, so it should be showing up.

[Caple]

Yep, I removed the jumper to make it work as slave.
Maybe I'll have to format her computer, but I really don't want to do it.
Hate to format other people machines, there is always a driver left or something important that was not backed up
But... I think I'll have to do it anyway.

[snafu099]

While you can convert a fat32 drive to ntfs IT IS A ONE WAY CONVERSION. Standard warning about backing up data before doing.

There must be a reason why she has xp installed on fat32 to begin with. Converting boot drive resolves nothing with secondary setup

Administrative disk management tool in xp for fat32 is very poor. It will only reconize 32g of drive and max 2g partition size.

To use fat32 and get full drive capacity you will need to use third party s/w or work from a win 9x/me enviorment

[smearbrick1]

Why in the name of John Wayne's ass would you convert her boot drive to NTFS just to correct a problem with a primary slave? Odds are, you never created either a NTFS partition or a primary DOS partition on the drive before you installed. I'd imagine that is what the problem is. This is why the volume is showing as unavailable even though it is showing up in device manager. This same thing happened when I took a drive from a Linux machine and tried to piggy-back in my Windows machine... It would install the disk but not recognize the volume. It's all about formatting, and changing the filesystem on the boot drive from Fat32 to NTFS (although recommended) is not going to correct a problem with primary slave.

[Caple]

After reading some stuff here and there I was aware of everything you guys said on the last two posts.
The problem is that I don't remember if I created a new volume before removing from my computer. It seems I did. I think I'll get the drive back, remove the partitions and then get back to her computer. Then I'll probaly be able to create partitions there.
I don't know why the hell she uses FAT32, I believe someone installed Windows for her, she obviously can't do it
Anyway, suggestions of steps to take are very welcome.

[Prot]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but does CMOS recognize the drive correctly? You make no mention of the size of her primary drive. Does her BIOS support a 120 gig HD?
Looking at the specs for her MB, I see it only has support for UDMA/100/66.

[snafu099]

You posted that the drive is properly reconized during boot up and that it shows in admin tools - disk management.

from disk management just create a single ntfs partition and format it.

if the drive needs to be partitioned and formated to fat32 then I would do the following:
1. make sure you have a working win98se or winme floppy boot disk that has fdisk and format
2. for data safty disconnect the ide cable and power to boot drive
3. boot to boot to win9x floppy
4. run fdisk and partition as desired
5. format the partitions
6. reconnect the boot hdd

all cable connections and such are done with system power off
fat32 partitions can be converted to ntfs from within xp later if desired.
useing fat32 gives read/write access to the drive from a dos boot and older dos programs can be run.

we all use our pc's in different ways and when working on someone elses pc my first rule is to preserve what they have, don't assume they want it the same way I do.

[Caple]

Another annoying thing that I don't know what to do :/

I turned it on and the HD was found on the boot, as primary slave, as I set. Windows XP loaded and found the new device. The message that everything was ready to use appeared. But, there is always a "but", the HD does not appear on Windows Explorer or Disk Manager.
Bruno

[Caple]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but does CMOS recognize the drive correctly? You make no mention of the size of her primary drive. Does her BIOS support a 120 gig HD?
Looking at the specs for her MB, I see it only has support for UDMA/100/66.

I supposed her mobo would accept as I believe I've seen people with similar config (same mobo and HD).
I did a little search about the max HD size for this mobo and didn't find anything usefull (I confess I didn't go deep).

[Caple]

http://www.firingsquad.com/hw/59/ASUS_A7S333/

Storage
2 x UltraDMA 100/66/33

Cant' be real :/
Seems like Prot was right.