i had the same problem with a maxtor. i bought a new hard drive and wanted to use the maxtor as a second drive. it would not format. so, i took the cables off the new drive, made the maxtor a single master drive again and formatted the drive using the xp cd. then i made it a slave again, reconnected the master and voila! all's well..
Thanks. That's something I haven't tried. I did try reformatting it from within XP Pro, also from the dos boot screen. Partitioning works fine, but not formatting. A technician told me that since the Maxtor was previously formatted as my C: drive, the OS transferred to it prevents the formatting.
I'll try your suggestion since I'm about to throw it away and buy a new hard drive.
that's so obvious a mistake i didn't consider it...of course you cannot format a drive while using it! like trying to change a tire while riding the bike....just do as i suggested you can't go wrong but don't let it start installing files. take out the cd as soon as the formatting is done...
Unfortunately, even the procedure you recommended did not work. The drive still hung up at the end.
What did work was to go to the Maxtor website and download their drive reformatting / maintenance program and save it in Windows XP. (Just the program, not the bootable iso file.)
With the Maxtor HD configured as "slave", I booted into XP and ran the HD Maxtor utility. Voila! It ended an two day saga with many hours of frustration.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
porthos
20 Posts
0
April 7th, 2005 15:00
Skwipp
3 Posts
0
April 7th, 2005 18:00
Thanks. That's something I haven't tried. I did try reformatting it from within XP Pro, also from the dos boot screen. Partitioning works fine, but not formatting. A technician told me that since the Maxtor was previously formatted as my C: drive, the OS transferred to it prevents the formatting.
I'll try your suggestion since I'm about to throw it away and buy a new hard drive.
:smileymad:
porthos
20 Posts
0
April 7th, 2005 19:00
Skwipp
3 Posts
0
April 10th, 2005 13:00
What did work was to go to the Maxtor website and download their drive reformatting / maintenance program and save it in Windows XP. (Just the program, not the bootable iso file.)
With the Maxtor HD configured as "slave", I booted into XP and ran the HD Maxtor utility. Voila! It ended an two day saga with many hours of frustration.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Steve