Windows [help] Cannot format new 2nd hand Hard Drive

Hello all

I've just bought a new 2nd hand hard drive (which has an installation of Win 98 on it) and I'm having a few problems with it. I currently run Win XP with a SATA HDD as my main drive. I'm trying to install a IDE HDD as a secondary storage drive. I've plugged the second drive in and every time I boot the PC it boots the IDE drive, which puts me into a Win 98 command line.

I've gone through all the boot options on the BIOS, trying various different HDDs (I have my SATA drive partitioned) but still no potato!

I've tried a boot disk but XP boot disks don't have fdisk on them anymore. How can you put fdisk on a boot disk? Or should I just try to use the install CD? I've found some bootdisks from bootdisk.com but they seem to be more orientated to installing in XP on the HDD. I don't want to do that... I just want to format it.

Is it possible to boot the PC and then plug in the HDD once the PC is running? So that it doesn't try and boot the PC from the IDE drive. This does sound like a stupid idea however. I don't think you are supposed to plug in IDE drives in the same way you would a USB drive.

Thanks in advance you your help,

Matt

 

Just change the first boot device to the SATA drive - some BIOSs may call this SCSI.

 

I had been wondering why there was an option for a SCSI drive in the BIOS.

I'll give that a try then!

{edit} That worked perfectly, thanks.

Thanks for the welcome. They look like nice forums!

 

Glad it's sorted and welcome to bit-tech/the forums