My first post here lets see if i do it right. Last year my Western Digital hardrive ran into all sorts of problems and would not boot from it (XP is the OS) i gave up with it and installed a new one. As challenge i am trying to resolve the problems, when booting from it a message comes up saying can't find OS ? if i look at the properties it shows as being empty, but if you go to format it it shows as having 50gig of files on it. I have tried to use it as a slave but can't open anything and can't defrag or scan it. Any ideas or anything i can try.hah: Regards
I will have a look at the FDISK never done that before i am a newbie is that a DOS command FDISK from an A prompt ?
You don't need to activate a partition with Windows 2000/XP. The other thing is that if the formatting was done with NTFS instead of FAT32 or FAT16 filesystems, FDISK can't read it. What you might try is installing Windows over itself on that drive. It's pretty much the same thing as a regular install, but you don't format the drive.
i was not aware of Win2k & XP didn't require the primary partition to be active, i was born & bred on Win9x, but i'm learning fast, so can't Win2k & XP still exist in the extended partition (as hidden or visible)
They can exist on any partition you want, primary or extended...although the partitioning/formatting section of the Win2k/XP install doesn't have primary or extended. In fact, you don't even need to prep the drive before the OS install.
go to disk management (Right click my computer > Manage disk) and initialise your drive from right bottom of the disk management window.
