Partitioning a SATA drive

[graham01]

Just doing a new build and have XP installed on a 120G SATA drive. All was cool.

Used Disk Director 9.0 to partition the disk: 20G primary with OS and programs, about 80 G as logical for data and another 20G for backups etc. All seemed to go well during the partitioning. Windows detected new hardware and did it's thing.

BUT, now I have a 20G C: drive and no sign of the other two partitioned drives in Windows My Computer. Anyone have any ideas on where I go from here?

Graham

[Strawbs]

you probably need to format the drives! If you have XP Pro - you can use XP's built-in disk management tool in control panel>admin tools>computer management.

If you have already formatted the partitions, you may have used a format foreign to Windows - but that is very much doubtable.

[graham01]

Running XP Home, but will give that a shot somehow. They are all NTFS.

Graham

[graham01]

Formatted both new partitions as NTFS - no change, still no drive letter in Windows.

The System Information program is accurate showing one 120G SATA disk with 3 partitions.

Graham

[Midknyte]

did you try removing then recreating the partitions with diskmgmt.msc?

[graham01]

I assume that's Windows disk management? Don't believe that is capable of creating a partition on a drive with the OS on it. This is an SFF system, one HDD.

Graham

[Midknyte]

yes that is disk managment. have you used it before? you can create partitions with it. that's what it was designed to do.

with a normal install of xp, you just need to specify the size of the system partition. once you boot into windows, you can partition the unallocated space.

[graham01]

OK - problem fixed. Real simple actually - went into ctl panel, admin tools, disk management - selected the new partitions and selected the letter I wanted to assign to them. TaDa, all fixed.

Midknyte, I was aware of the program but haven't used it before. From what I read on it, it will not create a partition on a disk with the OS present. The Acronis Drive Director was a known SATA compliant alternative and worked very simply and efficiently - just had to find that last step.

Thanks a bunch all,

Graham

[Midknyte]

you CAN create/delete partitions with diskmgmt. diskmgmt.msc cannot create partitions if you set the entire drive as one large partition during the xp setup. that's one of the weaknesses. you need to manually choose a smaller sized system partition, then leave the rest alone until you get into windows.