hard drive install problems with XP

A friend just gave me an old 40 GB drive he had in his computer to add as a second drive in my computer. I hooked it up and turned on my computer, everything worked fine. A 38.5 GB drive was showing up as drive F. There was still old data on the drive and it was also still in fat 32 because it was on a win98 machine. So I decided to reformat it to get rid of all the old files, and convert it to NTFS. It went through about 99% of the formatting process then said that it could not complete the format. Tried again and got the same result. So, I opened up computer management, then disk management from there. I converted it to a dynamic disc and added a new volume, and was able to get the formatting to complete. Now, the drive is only saying that it is 31.5 GB. Before, it was showing as 38.5. And it wont let me convert it back to a basic disk. What happened to the other 7 GB?

> Now, the drive is only saying that it is 31.5 GB.

Sounds like a Bios issue. There is a known 31.5GB barrier. Look here: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB315-c.html
You can try and upgrading your Bios, it might help.

I dont think its the barrier because the master drive is a 45 GB and it works fine. And before I tried to format the new drive, it showed up as 38.5 GB.

Any ideas on why I wasn't able to format it as a basic drive? I tried a few times and it always got to 99% then said it could not finish the format.

Maybe the drive has some major bad sectors on it or has other problems. I would try reformatting it again and even putting it on another computer and see what you get.

Maybe reformatting it back to FAT32 although FAT32 has larger clusters than NTFS unless you chose otherwise. Check the cluster size to see if it is 4K or less.

Interesting to note:
Win2k/XP comes with the "convert" command-line utility to go from FAT32 to NTFS; this conversion tends to give the volume greater fragmentation of system areas and non-optimal cluster sizes (original size maintained).


Interesting read of FAT vs NTFS
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/2801