Hard drive problems

clowrym · Post by **clowrym** » Tue Dec 28, 2004 10:54 pm

system:
P4 3.2e
1gig ddr
western digital wd800jb 80 gig hd
asus p4c800delux mobo

I purchased the western digital hard drive a year ago, and a couple months ago I was changing main hd's from a maxtor 80 to my wd 80, and used the included software, "data life guard 11", it installled "dynamic drive overlay" on the hard drive. NOw I have upgraded to the system above, basically everything new except the HD's. I tryed to install windows as ussual, removing existing partitions(hoping to get rid of the WD software) and creating new one. Everything went fine until after the system rebooted during the install process. Error message came up , cannot read from specified disk, So i tried again to load windows setup only this time windows didn't read a 80gig hd, only a 34 gig hd, and a couple of weird partitions under a different section. So from this point I decided that getting rid of this software is not happening!! So i load data life guard, and set up the disk again, reads all 80 gig, formats etc and everything looks fine. start to install windows again and same only 34 gig not the full 80.
Again loading the datat life guard I finds that when I try and run any tools on the disk it tells me there is no 80 gig hd, only one 34 gig bios drive. I am now sure what I bios drive is, and none of my tools seem to do anything, I would like to get rid of the datat life tools, and have my full 80 gig availlable and cannot figure out where the problem lies.
If anyone could help that would be greatly appreciated, this is drivin me nuts!!

clowrym · Post by **clowrym** » Tue Dec 28, 2004 11:20 pm

Well i fixed the bios drive problem, but I still can't get windows install to read more then 32248mb
And I think I may have gottin rid of the data life guard software!! just checking now

clowrym · Post by **clowrym** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 12:21 am

I have found one issue..but don't know how o resolve it
My mobo supports drives larger than 80gig, I have installed my other drive and the bios reads it fine. as for the wd drive, the bios only see's 33.8gig and the operating system the same unless the software from wd is installed. Before I used this software to copy a drive, I din;t have this problem. Now I don't know how to remove it and get back to origional configuration! I did find a posting at WD on how to remove the "Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO)" which is the software that allows older bios systems to read teh larger drive, but this still doesn't allow me to read the full 80 gb on this drive....

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 12:22 am

Low-level format the drive. That'll blast out anything on the drive and return it to factory condition. (Should be labeled as "write zeros to the drive" or something along those lines in WD's DLG software.) Then partition it the way you desire and format.

clowrym · Post by **clowrym** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 1:35 am

no luck there either, I could only get it to format the 33 gig that the computer see's...either in dos or in windows ona different system.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 1:41 am

Hmm...low-levelling it should've removed the dynamic overlay. Try formatting the drive with dynamic overlay, rebooting, and then removing the dynamic overlay software via DLG and re-partition and format it again.