Format sata usb drive

[rfisher]

I know, I really should stop doing this sort of thing. It was so much easier when I was playing with Dos in the 90s.

Anyway, I've got a nice new 80Gb SATA laptop drive which I'm going to use as a portable backup device.

I've bought a nice USB adapter case to plug it into USB ports.

My laptop sees the drive but it's not formatted so;

Can I format it in Xp with it mounted as a USB hard drive?

If not is there a driver somewhere that will let me boot off 3.5" floppy and mount the drive that way so I can format it after fdisk partitioning?

Ta.

[SneakyNeil]

Right click my computer, manage, disk managment - I'm sure you'l figure it out from there

[rfisher]

Can see the drive in disk management but there's no file system or volume name as it's unformatted.

Can't do anything to it either.

Anymore ideas?

[SneakyNeil]

Right click on the unallocated space on the right, 'create volume', follow the wizzard.

HTH
Neil

[rfisher]

Thanks.

It's a GPT protective partition and I can't delete it or give it a volume name.

Think I'm stuffed unless I can put it in a laptop or desktop with a SATA interface.

Don't you just love puters!

[Scraggles]

rfisher said:

Thanks.

It's a GPT protective partition and I can't delete it or give it a volume name.

Think I'm stuffed unless I can put it in a laptop or desktop with a SATA interface.

Don't you just love puters!

pretty sure desktop sata is different from laptop sata

you can still get dos box, or try a local computer shop ?

[malman]

www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx

32bit xp apparently can't handle GPT if its got a volume defined in it. You could knock up a virtual machine (if you don't have one) with either xp64 or 2003 sp1 and nuke it. Doubt it will make a difference if its internal or over usb

[rfisher]

(must not stare at Register1.net babe)

Sorted now thanks.

Shoved my Xp home disk in the laptop and pretended I wanted to load Xp on the SATA drive.

Setup kindly scrubbed the MAC format that was on there and put a nice shiny NTFS partition on.

After that I could use disk management normally.

Thanks for the replies anyway.