I have installed a new 2Tb seagate on an 4yrs old Dell 531 running vista 32. At first the drive wouldn't format pass 54%. So I downloaded new nvidia nforce drivers and they are showing in Device Manager under IDE Controllers and I can see the new driver hanging off port 1. However, it still wouldn't format pass 54%. The bios can see it, Disk Management can see it, so I tried one more time to do a Quick format instead of full format. It did it in 2 secs. I don't want it to throw a fit after it's half full so I want to verify it with Seatools but Seatools for Windows can't find the drive. Is there any other way of verifying the drive is ok?
If it's still showing up in Disk Manager and it was able to be formatted, even if it was a quick format, then you should be all set. But just to be sure, if you open a command prompt (start -> all programs -> accessories -> command prompt) then enter the command "chkdsk <drive letter>: /R", it will run through a fairly intensive check on the drive. You may have to reboot to start the process.
Sometimes you can get around it if you make it a dynamic disk first. Old chipsets don't like these newer 2TB+ drives much. Of course it's only helpful for secondary drive as dynamic disk won't be bootable on that system.
@faugusztin yes, that's the driver I installed. Seatools for Dos recognised the drive and it passed both the short and long tests. It seems to be working: but it still bugs me because from power on to post is now 45 secs. I guess I'll just have to start putting stuff on there and pray it won't complain past the 1 Tb mark. As for Seatools not seeing it, I'll put it down to incompatibility between Seatools and the chipset as plenty of people are having similar problems.
You can still take out the drive, put it in other computer, test it with seatools, if it passes, put it back to the old computer. You got M4A79XTD EVO according to your signature, why don't you the hard drive it in that computer for short test ?
