New Hard Drive - Formating Problems

[tim_howard]

I've just followed the article "Installing A Hard Drive - Step by Step" to install a second hard drive to increase my available memory.
I've connected up the Hitachi Deskstar 500gb drive (IDE) to the middle (grey plug on the lead) and set the jumpers to slave.
I've initialized the drive in "manage" (I'm running XP Sp3 on an old Dell Dimension 4400).
Now comes the problem.
The drive is showing as drive 1 with the original master as 0.
I right click on the drive and go through the wizard to create a partition (initially I used the full size but when it failed - see later - I've now reduced this to a 1gb partition to accelerate my experiments). The only option for formating is NTFS. It goes through the process saying that it is formating to 100%, then fails and says "windows cannot complete the format" (or something like that).
I can then see the drive so I right click and format. It will allow me to format as FAT, but not FAT 32 nor NFTS.

Ideally I want to create 3 partitions 77gb, 125gb and remainder - so that I can back up the initial 80gb drive, and an external 120gb drive.
I could probably do as above and create 3 partitions in FAT format but I presume that NTFS is the best format and is superior to FAT; also it seems odd that I simply cannot follow the partition wizard without it failing.

Any thoughts on how to resolve?

[mikeL]

Have you tried Hitachi's drive software to partition and format the drive,

[pam123]

Set both drives to CS (cable select) and double check that cable.

If you continue to have trouble with it you will need the Hitachi hard drive diagnostic.

[glc]

Hitachi does not offer installation software, just diagnostics.

Dell ships with cable select type cables and drives set to cable select. You need to use cable select. Hitachi jumpers can be confusing, you may have it set to the wrong number of heads. Try AB + EF first - thats cable select with 16 logical heads.

You also need at least SP1 on XP to see more than 128gb.

FAT partition size is limited to 2gb. You should be using NTFS.

[tim_howard]

Much appreciated - I'll try the suggestions tonight and report back

[tim_howard]

I've tried the suggestions above and also updated the BIOS (read another article that suggested that that could have been the problem. Having run the Hitachi diagnostics it shows no errors with the drive itself. I've again managed to partition but not format at all with NFTS. One partition I created as primary and approx 7gb and that formated with FAT16, but an attempt to format a 17gb partition (logical drive) with FAT32 also failed.
I checked also that the apati.sys file has correctly been updated from the original XP Homeedition to the updated SP3 file (picked up from another article).
An outstanding on the check list is the drive access speed and whether it is supported by the BIOS - I picked this up from another article on the net. I noted that in the Hitachi diagnostic it was at level 5 (100) not the more problematic (with older machines) level 6 (133), but I'm not sure what speed the updated 4400_A06 BIOS will support.

Any other thoughts welcome - I'm new to this but trying to learn quickly so apologies if there are gaps in my understanding.

[pam123]

Assuming the drive has a clean bill of health (and I'm not ready to do that) that leaves the IDE cable, the motherboard, or the XP install.

You did not have to go into the bios, IDE 133 drives are backwards compatible with IDE 100 motherboard connectors.

What I would do is find a friend willing to let you hook that drive up, perhaps via usb, and see if his/her computer has problems with it.

If that's the case then return the drive for exchange.