Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with windows and harddrive

Does my hard drive have permanent issues?

R a c h e l — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:05:00 -0800

Can I remove a partition and use my hard disk as normal? Rather long explanation... So, my original problem would be best explained by this older question I asked.

Basically, my vista partition stopped booting one day, with a couple error messages when I attempted startup recovery, the most significant (I think) being "system volume on disk is corrupt". Does this mean there is a part of my hard drive that has been messed up? I've never been too gentle with my laptop, and I have dropped it 3-4ish feet onto carpet more than once (yes, I know how terrible that it. I'm completely aware).

I'm determined to use this until it refuses to turn on, though. I mean, I also cracked the screen and am losing real estate all over at a fairly constant rate. An external monitor helps with that, though. At any rate, I'd like to install a copy of windows 7 that I just bought (I've been using the beta, which I've had since March, and likes to tell me it's counterfeit frequently. This was installed on a different partition from Vista, and has worked fine since Vista stopped.)

So, in installing the copy of Windows 7, I would like to give it a bit more room than the current Windows 7 partition of 20gb. Vista has 200gb, and everything I need on there has been backed up. I know fairly well how to erase the vista partition, grow the Windows 7 partition, etc.

My question is, will I run into problems because of whatever caused the Vista failure? Is there a bad sector or something that will give me grief? Is there some sort of formatting I can do before installing windows 7 to sort of start over with the disk? (There is absolutely nothing on this computer that is not backed up that I need.)

I'm sorry for the long explanation, with probably plenty of extraneous information. Thanks very much for your help!

Where's the XP Installer's Undo?

kristi — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:17:38 -0800

A Windows 2000 hard disk got clobbered by the XP installer and is "unallocated". What are my next steps? I have an old PC running Windows 2000 (SP 4). There are 3 internal drives:

D: 40 GB (Win2K system disk)
C: 200 GB
F: 500 GB

Recently, I tried to install WinXP on the C drive so I could dual-boot Win2K and XP. I ran the XP installer (new install, not upgrade); it successfully completed but I could never boot from C; it was giving me various errors about missing hal.dll and stuff. I've basically given up on the dual boot on this machine; I don't need it badly enough to spend more time on it.

After my first attempt to install XP, I discovered Win2K no longer mounts the F drive. It still shows up in the BIOS, but not in Windows Explorer; only the C and D drives show up in the Explorer address bar now.

When I go into Computer Management, I can see the missing drive in the Disk List and Graphical View, but not in the Volume List. In the Graphical View, it shows up as

(left side)
Disc 0
Basic
465 GB
Online

(right side)
[no letter drive here]
465 GB
Unallocated

As far as I can tell from Googling around, the F drive apparently had EZ-Drive on it (I tried Partition Magic 6, and it gave me an error saying "EZ-Drive has been detected on drive 0, but EZ-Drive is corrupt. Run the EZ-Drive setup diskette to correct this problem."), and apparently XP hates EZ-Drive.

I've tried running

fixmbr \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0

(that's the device that shows up using Recovery Console's map command) from the Recovery Console, but it didn't change anything.

The Add/Remove Hardware Wizard can see the drive, too (it says the device is working properly).

I ran Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on the drive - did the Quick Test - and got

Test completed successfully

The drive shows up in the Physical Drive list in WD Diagnostics, but not the Logical Drive list.

I'd like to just undo whatever the XP installer did to the drive and get it back to where I can read and use it again. If I have to partition it, I can do that, but I'm wondering whether EZ-Drive will remain on the disk (it sounded like that would happen, based on some of the reading I've done) and what effect that would have on anything else I need to do in the future.

I only use this machine for a couple of pieces of software and I'd like to spend as little time as I can getting it working again. If at all possible, I'd love to avoid reformatting/repartitioning the drive. It just seems like there should be SOME way to undo whatever the XP installer did.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

How do I safely move my iTunes library to a different HD?

valleys — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:50:47 -0800

How do I safely move my iTunes library from one hard drive to another? I've read numerous horror stories on here from people encountering all kinds of problems when moving iTunes libraries around, so would like to get advice on how to plan and execute it correctly!

I have about 50gb of files on my 110gb internal HD, which is pretty much out of free space.

I have a 500gb external HD (that I currently use mainly for backups of all my digital photos) that I would like to move the iTunes library to, then delete it from my internal HD to free up space for work on the internal drive, and have much more space for new music on the external drive.

This is on Windows XP SP3. iTunes version 8.1 (I think - not there at the moment, but I haven't installed the latest update that it asked me if I wanted...)

And yes, I have another backup (Mozy) in addition to the external drive.

So, how do I move that 50gb of files without confusing iTunes or risking losing anything?

Choosing a filesystem for an external hdd

contraption — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:10:54 -0800

What filesystem should I use on my new USB 2.0 external hard drive? It'll mostly stay attached to an Ubuntu box and be used to store large video files for streaming to playback devices on my network, but I'd also like to be able to take it to a friend's house and plug it into whatever computer they happen to have. The files will be large and replaceable, so I'm not even going to attempt to keep backups. I'm guessing it should be a Microsoft filesystem, since afaik Windows isn't happy with anything else and every other major OS has some way of dealing with them. Should it be NTFS? Some version of FAT? What tool should I use to do the formatting? I also have Windows and OS X machines available for setup.

Whats the Difference between a file system and a partition in Ubuntu?

complience — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:58:33 -0800

Whats the Difference between a file system and a partition in Ubuntu? I've recently migrated to Ubuntu from windows, but I still can't understand how the whole file structure works. What folder contains the actual ubuntu OS installation? What is a Grub? I've made a 2 partitions on my HD i think and I want to have my /home/ folder in one and all my other files in the other. But I only see one of the 23gig partitions, the rest of the HD space seems to be taken up by another folder called "file System" I assume this is where Ubuntu is installed.

I'm so confused, can anyone help explain it to someone with a mind still in windows mode?

Which USB Mass Storage Device is which?

msbrauer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:19:26 -0800

How can I change the generic name "USB Mass Storage Device" in my Vista system tray "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog? It's not uncommon for me to have a couple of external harddrives plugged in to my Vista laptop alongside a memory card and an mp3 player. While all of these devices have unique drive letters and unique names in windows explorer (one of the drives is always called 400gig, for instance, another is always called 500gig), they're all called "USB Mass Storage Device" in the system tray's "Safely Remove Hardware" menu. So when I need to unplug one but not all, I find myself taking a stab at which device is which and usually I pick the wrong one. I can solve the confusion easily enough by opening the "my computer" window and figuring out the drive letter from there, but that's an extra step that I'd love to get rid of. Ideally, the dialog would always say something like "Safely remove 400gig - Drive (x:)" and stay the same for each device each time it's plugged in.

So, is it possible to change the menu options from "Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device - Drive (x:)" to something unique for each device?

Need help with a computer diagnosis.

amyms — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:39:52 -0800

Computer Diagnostic Help and Interpretation, Please: My son inherited an 8-year-old Dell Dimension L933r from his grandpa. It had been upgraded to Windows XP and had an additional hard drive installed. It was working smoothly for us for almost a year, but recently it went into an infinite reboot loop (which we couldn't resolve ourselves) and we took it to an independent computer repair guy (details and questions inside). The computer repair guy (who came highly recommended for his competence and fair pricing from the guys at my son's favorite independent video game store) said that the C drive was "fried," that "nothing can be recovered from it" and that the CD/DVD drive is "shot" (which is apparently why we couldn't solve the infinite reboot problem with the Windows recovery disc - the machine couldn't read it) but he said that the additional hard drive (which is the E drive) is "fine" and that he can "put it into a new machine and fire it up right away"...

Now, my problem is, I'm conversant enough in computer terminology to have a casual conversation, but when confronted with a computer repair guy who answers nearly every question with a firm "Nope, that's not an option, sorry" I'm not sure how to move forward.

So, my question to AskMefi is: When he says that the C drive is "fried" does he truly mean that absolutely nothing can be recovered from it, no way, no how? (My son so badly wants to believe that he can figure out a way to do so - and he also thinks that his grandpa had the computer configured so that everything on the C drive was automatically backed up on the E drive. If so, would the computer guy see that and would he tell us if he did?)...

The computer guy only charged us $15 for his time in rendering a diagnosis (which was more than fair), but he also pushed pretty heavily for getting us to agree to put the E drive into a "new machine" (which he wanted to sell us). We ended up bringing the tower home and telling him we'd think about our options. I guess I'm just wondering what those options might be (beyond what the computer guy is pushing for) and should we seek a second opinion?

If you need any additional information to be able to answer my question, I'll be away from the computer intermittently, but
will check back as often as I can.

Why does Eraser crash, or what can I use instead?

wastelands — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:53:31 -0800

The Windows program called Eraser fails partway through erasing unused space on my drive. Why? Or, recommend a different, free drive erasing utility? Eraser used to work for me. But for several versions (the last year or so?), it won't complete the "erase unused space" job. I set it to run overnight and it only ran for 30 minutes and erased 9 GBs.

I am running Windows XP SP3 on a three year old Dell system. No other programs running to speak of, no anti-virus or anything like that.

I downloaded the latest version here:
http://www.heidi.ie/node/14

Anybody experienced this or could you recommend an alternative (preferably free) erasing program? I'm thinking of selling my computer once I upgrade to a new one, and I don't want my years of "deleted" data on the HDD.

Thanks!

Help me backup my system.

arniec — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:39:08 -0800

Data Backup Filter: I have about 6TB (yes TB, not GB) of data. I need to back it up BEFORE it crashes. I also need a good way to share it on the network. How can I do this? Details within... Yes, this topic revisited again. None of the questions asked so far have helped in my situation.

It seems the era of digital video and digital audio has created a storage nightmare for me. I have 6TB of data spread across 5 external hard drives (3 500GBs and 4 1 TBs, not all full). They are all currently connected to a Windows PC.

I have 1 blank 1TB drive which I just attached to my Mac Mini as I'm trying to retire my Windows PC and migrate all data to the Mac FS so I can run it off my Airport Extreme's USB port (the Airport Extreme won't read NTFS).

I've looked at "mirroring" my external drives nightly using a backup program but this does not safeguard me in case of electrical storm, fire, angry wife, etc. Besides, there must be a limit to the number of external drives I have...I'm running out of outlets quickly.

But I cannot imagine putting all of this information on DVDs, the time and expense would be insane. Online backup systems are not optimal as there is sensitive personal data in the files and I don't trust the privacy of online backup solutions, but the cost for 6TB is prohibitive.

I do have a lot of "redundant" files that I am attempting to clean up (previous hard drive crashes in my Windows PC resulted in panicked "copy off all my files!" moments, and as such I'm sure at least 1TB of my data is redundant, but the time it's taking me to sort this out file by file is crazy). Are there any programs (Windows or Mac) that can find these and only back them up once, saving me on DVDs?

Do I have any other options besides "buy a lot more external hard drives"?

How can I see total drive space in my pc?

mrbenn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:05:36 -0800

Can anyone help with a program to show total drive space in a PC across multiple drives? I would like to be able to see total available and free space across the 5 seperate hard drives in my Windows Vista system. It can obviously be done through My Computer and a calculator but is there a software solution (preferably freeware or open source) that can do the job. All the programs I can find through the usual means show folder sizes, percentage free etc but always for ONLY 1 drive. I

FAT3000?

tmcw — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:33:58 -0800

I think I'm finally switching to Ubuntu on my main machine. I have two 160GB external drives, currently both with NTFS, currently mirrored (by software, not a RAID). With what and how should I format/use these guys? Currently both drives have about 60 gigs used. I have 80 or so gigs on my laptop. I'd like them to be accessible by Windows in a clutch, and eventually (about a year) I'm getting a mac laptop, so I'll need to switch to that too. But my primary goal is to get a good Linux / Windows formatting scheme for the meantime. They're filled with music and school documents - no applications at this point. I'm aiming to use VirtualBox or similar (any suggestions?) to run Windows, so that might decide their accessibility?

Thanks!

Clean me up, Scotty!

rhoticity — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:47:51 -0800

What's the best way to erase my hard drive for resale if I don't have original OS reinstall CDs to work with? I have a 1.5 year old Dell laptop running Windows XP SP2 which I'm selling in the next couple of weeks (getting a Macbook... YESSSS). I'm going to make an attempt to sell it here on campus or through Craigslist before I try other methods, and so as soon as I transfer everything I want to keep over to my new computer, I want to clean the hard drive off as well as I can. The problem is that, in a misguided money-saving attempt when I first ordered the Dell, I did not request physical Windows XP reinstall CDs. Obviously I cannot just completely reformat the hard drive, then, since I will have no way of reinstalling the OS.. right? What do I do to get this thing ready to sell to a stranger?

For the record, there's nothing terribly "sensitive" on here, just personal/academic documents and photos, but I'd rather get it as clean as possible just in case some total weirdo gets a hold of it.

Any other tips on dealing with the less-than-stellar electronics resale market would also be appreciated.

A->B instead of B->A?!?!?

notsnot — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:39:13 -0800

How to recover from sync-ing a RAID 1 the wrong way? So I bought a couple 300G drives a while back, put 'em in RAID 1, and one of them died. Ijust now finally got around to RMAing the defective drive back to Seagate. Mind you, for the last nine months I've been using this single drive as a repository for all my photoshop work (all the RAW files are on another RAID pair).

So last night, I hooked up the fresh drive, turned on RAID in the bios, designated the two drives as a RAID group in the POST ("hit F10...") doohickey, and went to Windows. There, I ran the Nvidia media manager, saw both drives, and told it to sychronize the drives. This morning, I woke up and looked at the drive letter represented by these drives....and it's empty. In fact, Windows sees an unformatted drive. Best I can tell, the Nvidia program synced the drive with all my beautiful data to the empty drive, instead of the other way around.

WTF do I do now? First thing, I shut the machine down, and turned off RAID in the bios, so I can see both drives, both looking to Windows like unformatted drives. I'm unsure what I can do now to save my data! (Yes, I know I should have backed the fuck up. I didn't.)

Other information: ASUS M2n-SLI, Seagate 300G drives, Phenom/8G RAM. I'm not near the computer until this evening, but wanted to get y'alls thoughts.

How do I get my PC to recognize my Apple-formatted external hard drive?

kdern — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:09:46 -0800

How do I get my PC to recognize my Apple-formatted external hard drive? I use Super Duper on my Macbook to backup my files, and I have it set up to make the backup bootable. Now I want to copy 60 GB of MP3 files from the external hard drive to my PC laptop (as another backup and to use at work).

When I plug the drive (USB portable) into my PC, it recognizes it but it doesn't appear as a drive letter in My Computer.

Any tips?

XP unusably slow after STOP errors and running checkdisk - what's going on?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:29:42 -0800

So it's come to this - I see no other option than to ask a "help me fix my PC" question. After some troubleshooting the STOP errors seem to have been resolved, XP now boots successfully but is excruciating slow to the point of being unusable. Details and specs below the fold. Specifications:
-Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
-1 x 512 MB RAM
-XP Pro SP2
-PCI Firewire card
-onboard: USB 2.0, VIA Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IDE config:

1M: HD Maxtor 80 GB U-ATA
1S: empty
2M: DVD Burner
2S: DVD-ROM

First, the BIOS would occasionally fail to find the boot device (HD). Setting the primary master to "Not Installed" and rebooting, and then back to "Auto" remedied this for the time being.

Then a few days ago the machine started throwing a bunch of BSODs during normal operation. I recorded some of them for your viewing pleasure:

0x000000F4, 0x00000003, 0x829FF020, 0x829FF194 0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x05357000 0x0000007A (0XC03E1128, 0XC0000185, 0XF844A074, 0X08195860) ACPI.SYS 0x0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X8054AE34, 0XF6505BF4, 0X00000000)

Eventually XP wouldn't boot at all: system32/config was 'corrupted', or something along those lines. I assume this happened as a result of one of the STOP errors.

For some reason CHKDSK wouldn't run on this machine, so I took out the drive and ran CHKDSK on it with the drive attached to another machine. It did find a bunch of errors and corrected them all.

I put it back in its own box, and ran CHKDSK again from the Recovery Console (ran fine this time, and found no errors) and also a FIXBOOT for good measure.

Which brings us to the current situation. The system32/config error is gone, and Windows does boot, *but*:

-The XP splash screen fades in very slowly and seems halted here and there.
-Upon logon, the desktop background loads but no icons or taskbar appear.
-I can load explorer and systray via taskmgr, and sometimes they eventually load on their own without intervention, but this takes a *long* time. Somewhere in the ten minutes order of magnitude.

So technically speaking, Windows now runs, but it's so excruciatingly slow it's basically unusable.

Additional details:
-I have run a Spybot Search & Destroy scan: it found some threats and removed them. No new findings upon further boots and/or Spybot runs.
-I would scan for viruses, but I can't install AVG Free: I just removed the old 7.1 version (had to anyway as it was no longer supported), and the 7.5 installer happily skips from "pick a directory" to "Installation Complete!" but never seems to have touched a file at all! Doesn't even create the specified directory in Program Files.
-Network now also doesn't work. The Network Connections window says "Connected" but the machine receives no IP address nor lease from router. Router and rest of network are running fine.
-I tried System Restore with a variety of restore points from the past two weeks or so, but after going through the process (which also takes very long) it reboots and tells me that restoring to the previous point failed.

In short, I'm confused and could really use your insight. What's causing this and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed upon this. If you have any questions or need any further details, I'd be happy to answer and provide them.

How to get songs off of a Mac-formatted iPod in Windows?

JacksonEsquire — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 10:10:55 -0800

Is there a way to get songs off of a Mac-formatted iPod in Windows? My girlfriend's iBook G4 recently drowned in a pool of water. Nothing was able to be recovered from the hard drive and we'd like to get all 40GB of songs from her iPod.

However, we only have Windows machines to work with. Is there any possible way to get the songs off of the iPod? Or are we screwed.

I've heard of programs such as PodUtil, etc..., but don't think they'll work with Mac-formatted ipods.

Too many files?

chef_boyardee — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:12:22 -0800

Is it possible for Windows 2000/XP (or more properly, an NTFS disk volume) to "collapse" under the weight of too many files? I have about a million specialized data files spread out on about a hundred CDs (no, it's not porn) and would like to load them onto one of those 500 GB Firewire drives formatted with NTFS. I will spread them out among multiple directories, at least so that directory operations in various applications won't grind the OS to a halt.

But I have some concerns about whether a huge number of files could corrupt the volume somehow or invite read/write problems. Doesn't it take a lot of storage merely to index a million files?

How many files is "too many"? Is there any advantage to putting massive collections like this into zip files (if so I'd be using command line info-zip)?

Could turning on disk compression actually speed up disk access?

Ookseer — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:27:56 -0800

Could turning on hard drive compression actually speed up access on my laptop? I have an ultraportable laptop. It's got a decent processor and enough ram, but it has one of those tiny 80GB Toshiba iPod hard drives in it and the speed, both access and transfer is awful. (Plenty good for an iPod, horrible for real computing.)

I run a few applications that access the hard drive quite a bit, either loading or writing a decent amount of data. When I look at the task manager, my HD light is on solid while my CPU usage is around 15%. I'd, of course, love to speed up access.

So my thinking goes like this: If I click the "Compress drive to save disk space" it will put a little more data in every sector, so each seek and read should be a little more efficient. Since my CPU is near idle anyway it could use those extra cycles to process the compression.

So the question: Is this assumption true?
Are there other drawbacks to compressed NTFS volumes? (Like being more likely to go corrupt, harder to recover corrupted files, fragmentation, etc?)

(And I'll throw in an extra related Q: Is there a way to tell Windows XP Pro to try to fill up more real ram before it start paging?)

Prescribe my sick, sick computer.

zardoz — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:54:57 -0800

The new hard drive I installed on my XP machine has been having problems, and I think the problem could be directly related to a tock! tock! sound that something is making... So I installed this drive last week and I had some issues installing it, but long story short I've gotten it to work ok. I put some partitions on it (3, each about 100 gigs). When playing World of Warcraft, though, the computer automatically shut down and I got a blue screen of death, though not the normal one. This one said that I may have hardware issues and that I should check everything to see if it's ok. This blue screen-crash happened several times, and I did run several disk-integrity-checking apps, and all of them said my HD is fine.

Then, seemingly on its own, my computer ran just fine for a week.

Then today, when I booted it up, it booted up sloooooow. Like 10 minutes as opposed to 1 or 2. I got online and surfed for a minute and everything crashed. Then I went through a series of reboots: I would be prompted to start in safe mode, but it would reboot before this could happen. I got an error just after BIOS finished saying in all caps DISK ERROR (something something (sorry, I forget what exactly)). Another time I got an error saying my isapnp.sys file was missing/corrupt--I hunted for instructions to fix this in Windows Setup, but haven't needed to do it yet. Finally, also seemingly on its own, it rebooted like nothing was wrong.

Then I noticed the tock! tock! The sound is spaced about 3 seconds apart, and if I hear it, the computer is soon to crash. Obviously that's a hardware issue, but what is it? My hard drive? Motherboard? I'm waiting for the other boot to drop here, so any help you could give would be appreciated.

harddrive question

willmillar — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:27:24 -0800

TechSupportFilter: having problems with an ata harddrive all right i'm having some computer problems. i'm trying to set up my dell desktop. my intention was to install another IDE harddrive (100gb) along with the current ATA (80gb). so i just assumed i'd have enough IDE cable and went ahead and took the ATA drive out because it was easier to put that in a different slot than the IDE. so i took out the two ATA cables (two separate thin plugs - one short and one long - one on an IDE-looking-cable and one on a blue, 3 threaded cable) and set it off to the side. i then fooled around with the IDE drive, finally realizing i couldn't do it. so then i put the ATA drive back in its slot. after that, i took out some compressed air and sprayed the whole inside of the case off (man was it dusty!).

well i booted up windows to make sure nothing went earth-shatteringly (not a word?) wrong and it seems fine. i can both read and write files to the drive. however i tried to do a reinstallation of windows. i popped the slipstreamed sp2* into the drive and booted from it. it loads and gets to the screan where it says to press enter to set up windows. when i press enter, it says it cannot find a harddrive and to press f3 to reboot. it says to run a manufacturer's disc diagnostic (which i tried... to no avail). i then went back into xp and right clicked the drive and tried to format it. when i'd have "quick format" checked, it said that it could not be performed, but when it wasnt checked, it said the disc was in use (even in safe mode).

or could this be dell not wanting me to reformat on my own. this is such a convoluted question ... i apologize. it could just as well be a simple hardware problem. i'm not sure how much of the above information is necessary, but i figured i'd give all the info i had. sorry about that.

i really appreciate your help.
thanks,
will

*i've used this cd to set up other computers - it's worked fine

Watch my harddrive

MintSauce — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:06:19 -0800

How can I watch what is being written to my hard-drive? I have a really noisy hard drive, it always has been and as it seems to work fine, it doesn't really bother me. It also has the added advantage of giving me an audible warning whenever my computer is really 'crunching' hard running a program.

However, recently it has made a lot of noise when nothing is being run. I'd really like to find an application that would show me what program and what data is using my hard drive during these periods.

Any suggestions?

iPod newbie on Windows XP needs help...

Al_Truist — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:49:44 -0800

iPod newbie on Windows XP needs help... I'm on Windows XP. My hard dive died. Dead. I've lost all my music.
Thankfully, it's all on my iPod, which I got for Christmas. I'm getting a new drive... how do I get the music off the iPod and onto the computer? I don't mind buying an app to do this if it makes it easier and is relatively cheap. In addition, since I'm new to the iPod in general, are there any apps for XP I should also check out?

How to install old OS on a new laptop hard drive

twsf — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 16:28:07 -0800

My laptop's hard drive is reaching capacity. How can I install a larger hard drive without having to buy a new version of Win XP Pro (which was pre-installed on the laptop when I bought it, and IBM will no longer send me a CD-ROM version of the OS at a reasonable price, since the machine is long out of warranty). If buying a new version of XP is the only option, how do I install it on the new hard drive (or will the laptop just boot to the installation CD-ROM if there's no OS installed when the power is turned on?)

please help a mac user format a hard drive using windows.

Silky Slim — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:43:53 -0800

please help a mac user format a hard drive using windows. i'll try to keep this as short as possible.
i have an 80gb hard drive i want to use in an mp3 player (xclef hd-500).
i bought the mp3 player used, with a 40gb drive in it, and it works great. i had the 80gb drive formatted as fat32 ahead of time, but when i placed it in the player, the screen said "no partition". i e-mailed digmind tech support and their reply was that fat32 by itself isn't enough; i'm also to make it a primary partition and assign it a drive letter. so i copied all the files off the 80gb drive to reformat.
i have access to a pc right now, so i thought i'd format the drive using an external usb2 enclosure, but i can't get this pc to recognize the drive.
so my options as i see them are:
1. somehow install a driver on the pc so it can see the drive and format it using partition magic or something;
2. format the drive on my mac using a mac program;
3. format the drive on my mac using my virtual pc.
4. give in and have a pc tech do this for me.
help me find the right path! thanks.