jallenaz,

Thanks for using the Dell Community Forum.

Can you tell us how you formatted the new drive.  Also, exactly when does this error happen?

I formatted and partitioned the hard drive using the Maxblaster 3 software that came with the HD on a CD.   That was after I tried formatting it with Partition Magic, but I couldn't get the computer to recognize the hard drive afterward.  So I went to the Maxblaster 3 and formatted it again.

The error message happens as soon as the computer boots up. 

Thanks,

Jim

>Can you tell us how you formatted the new drive.  Also, exactly when does this error happen?

Sorry for the multiple posts.  I don't know what happened when I hit the stop button on my browser.

Message Edited by jallenaz on 01-12-2004 02:43 PM

jallenaz,

Try posting this in the Dimension Hard Drive as well.  There are some very knowledgeable users over there when it comes to Partition Magic.

Thanks Michael,

I posted over there first, and someone told me to post here also.  I haven't heard anything from over there yet.  There have been some similar messages, but nothing that has to do with hard drives installations.

Tonight  I will try disconnecting the HD and see if I can get back to where I started.  So you think that because of the new drive letters explorer could be having some sort of error?  It's seems like explorer was open when the drives were recognized, so it had an error.  But I don't recall that it was.  Also I would think that just shutting it down and restarting it would reset things.  But then, that would be too easy.

Thanks for the help though.

Jim Allen

My question is this:

Why use a third party drive utility when Win2K has a perfectly usable utility built into it?

1. Right click on "My Computer" and click Manage from the menu.
2. Click on the Disk Management icon in the list.
3. You should see your new HD listed there as Disk 1
4. Delete any partitions that are on the drive, and repartition/reformat right from within Win2K.

You may have to boot into Safe Mode to do this, since you said you were having those errors during the bootup.

I have just never been a huge fan of third party utilities that do what Microsoft Products can do just fine.  Of course, not all MS products do it fine (like ScanDisk) but in this case, the MS Disk Management Utility should work perfectly fine.  (Just my opinion though)

Your advice sounds good.  I was hoping not to have to reformat the hard drive.   What I ended up doing was reinstalling Windows2k over itself.  Which fixed the error.  Then I at least had all my data still.  I know, I should have had it all backed up.  But that's part of what the new HD is for. 

Everything is working fine now.

Thanks,

Jim