Yet another hard drive question

[Ed_L]

After I installed the new 60 gig hard drive, the computer would only recognize 32 gigs. My son-in-law, who is quite good with computers, came over last night, and he found that I put a jumper on the hard drive that shouldn't have been there. After removing the jumper, the full 60 gigs showed up. Today, I'm getting a pop up message saying: SmartPlugIn Fault Report Drive NEC####### is reporting: Partition percentage use has exceeded 90%. Does anyone know what this means? I won't get to see my son-in-law again until this weekend, and it's a pain to see this thing pop up.

Ed

[d_kendal]

Hi Ed,

what brand of hard drive is it?

- David

[G. Couch]

I am officially at a complete loss Ed! One question...why would a misplaced jumper have caused you to only be able to access half the drive space?

[ItzRandy]

Ed,

This is just a shot in the dark but I believe that when you originally set up the drive and formatted it for use it only formatted for the 32 gigs it recognized.

Now that you have re-jumpered the drive and it shows the full 60 gigs the drive is reading that you have space that now exceeds the partitioned space.

The simple fix would invlove this being a backup drive rather than your primary. If so, simply transfer what you already have on the drive to your primary for temporary holding. Then simply re-format the new drive which will now format the entire 60 gigs.

Hopefully that all made some sense to you!

Randy

[Ed_L]

Thanks for the replies.

David,
It is a Maxtor 60 gig hard drive, 7200 rpm. I think it is the same one Jeanie bought.

Greg,
If I understood it correctly (which I might not have done), you can place the jumper so that the computer will recognize 32 gigs if it is an older computer that is not capable of recognizing the full 60 gigs. Apparently, that's what I did.

Randy,
I wound up with three partitions on the drive. Two somewhere around 27 gigs, and another at 5 gigs. If it ony formatted 32 gigs, I don't think I would be able to put files on one of the partitions, isn't that right? I am able to put files on all three partitions. But it's not a problem I can't live with for a while. I'll get my son-in-law back over here whenever he can spare the time.

Ed

[d_kendal]

Hi again Ed,
I've done some searching around and here's what I've come up with: the first thing I'd suggest you try is Maxtor's diagnostic utility
2nd, I'd try reformatting the drive like randy suggested
also, I'm not sure if it'd help, but you could try updating your computer's BIOS (but first make sure that you have everything backed up, and it's a good idea to make a bootable image (ISO) of your C: drive so you can boot windows from the CD you made your backup to in case there's a problem when you update - unlikely, but possible)

- David

[ItzRandy]

Ed,

At least you now know what happened. As for removing and combining the partitions, unless you have stand alone partitioning software, such as Partition Magic, you are going to have to do a reformat.

In that instance, you will have to move the info or files to another drive because all will be lost if you reformat and utilize one partition at the 60 gig size.

Like you said, let your son-in-law handle the fix. Besides, it affords those of us that hold the position of "son-in-law" feel like we are earning "extra points".

Randy

[d_kendal]

Hey Ed,

did you get your hard drive problem figured out yet?

- David

[d_kendal]

if you didn't get it working, here's one more suggestion. did you use Maxtor's software for installing the drive? if not, you can download it here:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/files/mbplus2.exe

you can use that to reformat the drive if you haven't tried that yet.

- David

[Ed_L]

I did use Maxtor's software to install it. The pop-up message still comes up, but my son-in-law is aware of that, and he's going to come over to take care of it for me. Probably won't be right away, as they're going to Disney World tomorrow. Since I'm the one who will be taking them to Chicago's Midway airport, he'll owe me.

Ed

[d_kendal]

sorry to hear that, Ed. I'm not sure what could be the problem, I just installed a 40 gig Maxtor (D740X) and I haven't had any of the kind of problems you've been having. have you tried calling Maxtor? if you're getting a fault report message, possibly it's a faulty drive.

- David