Sunday, February 6, 2011

Formatting a hard drive

The last new hard drive I bought was a Seagate 80 GB for my P3 in 2003 or 2004, and it came with installation software. Recently, I purchased a used/refurbished Maxtor 250 GB IDE/PATA drive to replace the 80 GB drive in my IDE/PATA to USB external enclosure. The disk was not formatted, and I had no idea how to format it without installation software. I could see it in the device manager, but not in "my computer". After some searching (and a call to my brother in WV) I found the download for the Seagate tools (Maxtor is now Seagate) and the Computer Management function in Windows 7 (Control Panel/System and Security/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management). I used the Computer Management function, and I now have a 250 GB external storage drive for back-ups.
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3 comments:

  1. jim trappFebruary 6, 2011 at 2:16 PM

    Tre' cool!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Diane ZentgrafFebruary 6, 2011 at 2:22 PM

    The last time I formatted a drive without installation software I was using Win98. Things have changed since the FDISK & format commands.

    ReplyDelete
  3. jim trappFebruary 6, 2011 at 2:27 PM

    I agree. And I miss some of those old commands. I felt I had at least some control.

    ReplyDelete

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