Faulty hard drive

Posted by: Richard Lord on 31 August 2008

Hi all

I know this might not be the most appropriate place to ask a computer question, but there some pretty computer savvy folk in this forum who might be able to help me.

I have a brand new Dell 500 Gig hard drive that had Vista on it. Because I hate Vista, I have replaced this drive with another 500 Gig with XP. After re-validating, all fine. So I decided to re-format the previously pre-installed Vista drive, so it could be used as a second (backup) drive. But I cannot do it. Windows valiantly shows a progress bar, then stops and tells me (rather unhelpfully) that Windows cannot format this drive. Why not?

It certainly worked OK when it was the boot drive. Strange.

Richard
Posted on: 01 September 2008 by Willy
Richard,

Can't be too specific but I do recall something about jumpers being set on a drive to indicate if it is a master/boot drive or a slave. Try google around that and you might get some pointers.

Regards,

Willy.