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new ibm hardrive trouble

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:21 am
by way2slo
i just got my warranty ibm 60g ata 100 harddrive 3 days ago, put it in a external usb2/1394 enclosure, everything was working fine. i try playing a 30 + tracks project and capture 1 hr dv, no problem.
something happened last nite, i boot my pc, turn on the external harddrive, go to my computer, click on the drive, error message 'cannot read format or something(cant remember what exactly it is), then i do a quick format and the drive can be read again.
i have fat 32 for the whole system, internal ide drive 1 and 2 partitions r fat 32. when i got this ibm drive, i format it as ntfs(i want to have fat32 on this drive but i cant),coz under windows xp, i can only choose 'ntfs' when i format, dont know why. do u think it might be the problem? as far as i know, i can have ntfs and fat32 running at the same time, m i wrong? please correct me if i m.
i also do the drive fitness on my ibm, it is in good shape.
knock on the wood, i hope it is not the defective ibm drive. :roll:

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2003 4:44 am
by Archeon
I have no information for you concerning wether your drive is faulty or not, but I can tell you that under win2k/XP it's only possible to create FAT32 partitions up to 30gig or so. MS implented this barrier with the sole purpose of pushing the NTFS file system.

You can create bigger FAT32 partitions than that, but then you'll have to use either partition magic or a win98 system disk's FDISK.

Also, you should have no problems combining both FAT32 and NTS partitions on one HD.

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:59 pm
by way2slo
thanks for the reply. i ended formatting the drive as fat32 under dos fdisk. u r right, under xp u cannot format the drive as fat32 if it is bigger than 36g size. the drive problem i ended up upgrade sp1 and it works fine now.
i m also getting noise after the drive sits at idle for 10mins, ibm said this is a new feature they added to recalibrate the hd as idle.
thanks