Format e: ? please nooooo!!!!

[Petri]

i have xp installed to c: and my secondary hard disk E/F
says is not formatted. so far these disks have been working fine together.

bios and xp both recognize E/F disk type and size correctly but
why i get error "E disk not formatted format now?"

system is
P3 800mHz (not oc )
P3B-F latest bios 1006

Maxtor 60Gb
Seagate 6.4Gb

XP-Pro no service packs

any help is appreciated
thanks

[Sasq]

What OS were you using them with?
What are they formated with (NTFS, FAT32. FAT16) ???

[Petri]

i'm using xp-pro

primary hard disk is NTFS
secondary FAT32

all programs are at primary ( c: ) and secondary ( e: and f:
= one disk )
is only for documents and back up.....

[Technoid]

Start with a win98 Bootdisk and see if they work then!

BTW:
Are you using some sort of "bios extender" software on them?

[Sasq]

What was the original OS that they worked with?

There *should* be no problems but it is useful to know

[Petri]

originally e/f disk was used with win98 and "c:" disk
was new and xp-pro was installed to brand new hard disk,
later i installed "e/f" disk back and it worked fine ( win98 was
removed ) two months.

i just re-installed xp-pro with no results.

grrrr

[Sasq]

Nothing comes to mind imediatly, but I'd try changeing the drive to the secodary controller (if it isn't already). I doubt it would help but its worth a try.

As another thought, was win98 the original OS on that drive or was it originally 95a or b?

Dan

[Greebe]

or c ?

[Petri]

win98 was original OS.....

[Sasq]

I've had some strange experiences with drives formated with win95a and sometiles win95b, which is why I was asking.

If you boot with a 98 bootdisk, can you still see the drives?

[MPR]

Are you saying that E/F were working with XP and now they aren't or they never worked with XP?

[Petri]

yes e/f worked perfectly with xp about for a two
months, and without any hard/software chances kabooom!

[MPR]

Ah, in that case see if you can read the drives using a DOS bootdisk (Win9X etc.) if not then you will have to reformat the drives. I would do an fdisk then format if you can't read the drive after the DOS disk. Could be a boot virus, corrupted partition table or the drive could be going bad.

[Greebe]

That's exactly what Sasq asked him todo... how about it guy?!

[Petri]

i tried with win98 boot disk and can't read e/f disk.
i removed e/f disk and will give it a try later.....
i have detect boot virus enabled and i´m using zonealarm
but not a real untivirus programs.


thanks for the help guys



i´m not yet formatting that disk.