Why Can’t I Partition My New Sata Drive?

[Daffy D]

For the last few months the Gods have been kind and the wind in the right direction that with all the downloads I was literally running out of disk space.

So saved my beer money and on the last trip to town treated myself to a shinny new Samsung 160gb SATA hard drive.

I decided on SATA as I wanted to partition it and clone my “C” drive onto it thus making the new SATA my system drive.

Installed the new drive but it did not show up in “My Computer” then I remembered, from previous posts on this thread, about having to format a new drive. So used Partition Magic to format the drive and there it was now recognized by the system. Unfortunately instead of showing the 160gb capacity it only registered as 149gb.

Ok no big deal and though I don’t like unexplained mysteries I could live with that. The real problem came when I tried to partition the drive. I had disconnected the other drives except for “C” so there would be no confusion as to which drive I was working on.

Partition magic went through routine of partitioning and all looked fine but at the last moment threw up a failed warning something about problems with the disk.

I then tried partitioning with Windows “My computer – Manage – Disk Management” same problem it would not complete the partitioning.

I then ran “Error-Checking” from the tools menu and that was OK. Reformatted the drive again but still could not partition it.

Apart from the partitioning problem and the lost 11gb the drive seems to be fine.

I have checked out the Samsung site and used their “Disk Manager” but that did not help. I even tried to wipe the drive and fill it with zeros in the hope to start all over again but that also brought up an error message.

I am using XP Pro SP3 and my M/B is ASUS P5VD2-MX SE with Intel Dual-Core Cpu.

All a bit vague I know and probably too many variables to throw up a solution but I feel better just having ranted about it.

Thanks.

[Forkinhades]

just go back to the shop where you bought it, Im sure they will happily do it for 200 baht, they did for me in tukcom.

[Tywais]

As for the disk space discrepancy, this is due to the way manufacturers fiddle with the numbers. 1MB is not 1,000,000 in the digital world but 1,048,576 Bytes. So, 160GB/1.048576 = 152.587 GB plus the overhead in the formatting process where the directory structure and file structures are built. Plus each sector has pointer information taking up space so ending up with 149GB then is correct.

[Daffy D]

just go back to the shop where you bought it, Im sure they will happily do it for 200 baht, they did for me in tukcom.

Unfortunately I live in the boonies and the shop is day trip away, if it was just round the corner I would go.

Still makes me feel a bit inadequate, I’ve partitioned other drives with no problem though not a SATA – is there something different about these drives?

Thanks “Tywais” for easing my mind on the lost 11gb.

Edited June 9, 2008 by Daffy D

[Tywais]

Still makes me feel a bit inadequate, I’ve partitioned other drives with no problem though not a SATA – is there something different about these drives?

No functional/operational difference. I've formatted/partitioned dozens of them with no problems at all. You might want to check your BIOS and be sure RAID is not enabled. Also, try a different SATA position on the mainboard.

[Daffy D]

Still makes me feel a bit inadequate, I’ve partitioned other drives with no problem though not a SATA – is there something different about these drives?

No functional/operational difference. I've formatted/partitioned dozens of them with no problems at all. You might want to check your BIOS and be sure RAID is not enabled. Also, try a different SATA position on the mainboard.

Before I restart my computer to get into the BIOS under which heading will I find RAID?

[Guest Reimar]

Daffy:

maybe you need to first to create a driver disk with the Raid driver on it Follow the Manual Instruction.

Than you start using the Windows XP CD and boot from it. Just to beginning you'll need to hit F6 for to install a extra driver for drives and here you need the Driver Disk created before. Point to the Driver dir if asked and let the Installation process carry on. You'll come to an point where you can delete the existing Partition and create a new one or two or so. You can do that and start the formatting of the Partition and if you don 't want to install XP new on that drive, just cancel the process after formatting.

But again. you need to set the right driver for SATA and you'll need to enable Raid in Bios as well.

Cheers.

[Daffy D]

Daffy:

maybe you need to first to create a driver disk with the Raid driver on it Follow the Manual Instruction.

Than you start using the Windows XP CD and boot from it. Just to beginning you'll need to hit F6 for to install a extra driver for drives and here you need the Driver Disk created before. Point to the Driver dir if asked and let the Installation process carry on. You'll come to an point where you can delete the existing Partition and create a new one or two or so. You can do that and start the formatting of the Partition and if you don 't want to install XP new on that drive, just cancel the process after formatting.

But again. you need to set the right driver for SATA and you'll need to enable Raid in Bios as well.

Cheers.

Thanks “Reimar” I vaguely recall seeing something about RAID drivers while installing Windows, I didn’t take any notice as I had no idea what it was about.

Will go have a look at that but I first got to make backup and shuffle all my stuff around so as not to tempt fate with messing with the wrong drive.

So little free space to play with it’s a logistical minefield, still that’s half the fun.