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Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) davethewave Profile I hate to bring up hard drives again but...I have a Hard Drive that came from a compaq notebook. I picked up the drive at a computer show. The hard drive may be messed up - the drive was sold as is - non tested (whaddya want for $4?). Anyway - if I set the primary drive to NONE in the BIOS, I can boot from the doc image and see the hard drive. It has two partitions - they show up as D and E - E is only approx 4 megs - the other partition is the rest of the 1 gig drive. Anyway - I cannot seem to get the drive reformatted to see a single drive and boot from it. When I try format - it only formats the one partition - not the entire drive. I have tried placing files from a dos boot disk on both partitions and I have also tried copying the doc contents to the HD with no results. When I try to change the bios and boot from the HD I get "missing Operating System" - but I can write and read from it when booted form the doc. Any hints ? Is the drive ready for the "recycle bin" ? David 04-02-2001 15:48:38

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) Tero Profile | Email If you want there to be one partition, you must use FDISK. Fire it up, delete the two old partitions, and create one new one. 04-02-2001 16:23:32

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) BigDog Profile | Email Sounds like you need to sys it, If you can get a 3.5 to 2.5 drive adapter and put it in a desktop PC (the adapter converts the 44 pin IDE to the desktop 40 pin), then boot from a bootable DOS or Win9x floppy; you may be able to run SYS and restore the boot secter. Be sure to note the drive parameters in CMOS on the webplayer (heads,sectors, etc), they need to be the same in desktop PC. You can fdisk it and make it bootable on the desktop pc then reattach it to the webplayer. This is how most install Win9x on it by copying the files on another PC. It would appear that drive is good, of course there may bad area on it which is power for the course on any older drive. 04-02-2001 16:27:43

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) davethewave Profile Cool - Thanks for the help - I will try both and let you know...BTW - My desktop has a couple of plugs coming from the power supply and going to the HD and CD. Both plugs have a female end that I can plug the power supply plug from the 2.5 to 3.5 converter into. My question is - Does the laptop HD require 5v or 12 v ? The plug (from the power supply) has a ground and live wire for both 5v and 12v of power. I don't want to fry the drive or my computer... Thanks 04-03-2001 05:10:51

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) BubbaDog56 Profile Dave, Even though the connectors from your computer power supply provide both 5v & 12v, the adapter should only use the 5v required by the laptop drive. If you look at the adapter board, the 12v pin should go no further than the connector. Should be fine, YMMV.... B'Dog 04-03-2001 05:47:06

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) davethewave Profile Thanks....I will let you know how it goes. 04-03-2001 06:36:47

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) conway Profile | Email Ok, here's what you need to do : (I'm assuming you got Windows on the DOC) Boot with the DOC. Run fdisk. Select the correct drive (option 5 I belive. -- double and triple check that you've got the right drive selected!!! :) ) Delete both of the partitions. Create a new large partition. Reboot the system still with the DOC. In windows, under My Computer you should now see 1 disk letter for the hard disk. (D probably). Right click, and select "Format". In the dialog box that comes up check the "Copy System Files" option. After thats finished, you should be able to boot to the disk with no problems. (You can also do this from the command line in windows if you wish. Do this : format d: sys d: -- assuming the drive created is D. ) BTW, always make sure you're doing all of this to the correct drive! If you got windows on the DOC, you'll have an extra drive with the uncompressed DOC (it'll look like a 40MB drive with a few files on it.) Don't format/fdisk THAT! Good luck! 04-03-2001 13:29:26

RE:Hard Drive Question (modified 0 times) davethewave Profile Thanks for all of the help - the directions worked out perfectly....unfortunaltely I discovered that the drives had other problems....however, the lesson i learned in working with HDs and Fdisk were worth the money I paid for the drives... 04-05-2001 09:10:26

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