Hard Drive issues.

[Trippy]

I have an ASUS F5-R.
It came with an 80 Gig SATA HDD installed.
I purchased a 150 Gig SATA HDD and upgraded.

Here's the problem.

The 80 Gig Hard Drive works in the Laptop, but not the drive enclosure I bought for it (Welland Sunbright 2.5").
The 150 Gig Hard drive works in both the enclosure and the Laptop.
I have previously had the 80 Gig Hard drive working in the enclosure.
The specific error is that Windows (XP Home, and Vista Basic Home - yes, I dual boot) registers that there's an external drive present, but tells me "I need to insert the disk".
This morning, after a stroke of inspiration I put the 80 Gig back in my laptop and used the disktools that XP-home has to delete all the partitions, and reformat the Hard-drive, but when I did so, it allowed me to do that, and registered the partitions, but, it seemed to think that there was something else there that it didn't know what to do with (it seemed to want to treat it as a seperate physical drive, it's hard to tell).

I have a feeling that this is related to my attempting to run Redhat and/or Ubuntu on that Hard drive, because I have had problems in the past with Linux versions creating partitions that windows can't get rid of, and lemme tell you it's a pain in teh toosh.

The only way i've found in the past of dealing with this is using PM-Pro, but, I only have PM-pro 5, it's on 3.5" disks, which my laptop doesn't have a drive for (and I lack an external one) and now Symantec want me to be US$70 to get PM-pro.

So, any suggestions on how to unscrew my Hard drive?
Any free Partition editors that an work on a USB drive?

[MacGyver1968]

You could use a "drive wipe" program that will wipe the whole drive. It will write characters to every bit on the drive. That should get rid of those shadow partitions. Then just create a new partition and format.

http://www.download.com/WipeDrive/30...html?tag=mncol

Here's a freebie...it says the evaluation only does 25% of the drive, but that should get the partitions.

[leopold]

the only solution i can think of is to boot with a floppy that has fdisk on it then run the following command:
fdisk /mbr

you will then need to repartition the disc.

[MacGyver1968]

the only solution i can think of is to boot with a floppy that has fdisk on it then run the following command:
fdisk /mbr

you will then need to repartition the disc.

That's a good idea...I wonder if you booted from your windows xp installation disk, and hit "R" to go to the recover console, if you could use commands there to do that. I'm not sure if you can target another drive from there. Then you have the problem of it being a USB drive, and DOS might not see the drive. I might need to try that just to see....or I guess you could just stick it back in the laptop, and do it from there to avoid any USB issues.

Trippy, is this an IDE or SATA laptop hardrive?

[MacGyver1968]

.....The only way i've found in the past of dealing with this is using PM-Pro, but, I only have PM-pro 5, it's on 3.5" disks, which my laptop doesn't have a drive for (and I lack an external one).....

Do you only have your laptop or do you have a desktop too? and does it have a floppy?

Edit:
If you only have the laptop, is the cd drive capable of burning cds?

[leopold]

Then you have the problem of it being a USB drive, and DOS might not see the drive.

i'm not too sure about XP but in all windows OS's before XP USB ports was not available in DOS.

[leopold]

Do you only have your laptop or do you have a desktop too? and does it have a floppy?

if it has the connector on the mobo then he could add one.
in this case he would have to configure the BIOS for the floppy size and enable the floppy to boot first.

[MacGyver1968]

One other solution. Partition magic will, I think, fix his issue. He has already paid for a copy of it, so I don't see any reason why it would be wrong to just download the torrent of PM that is cracked...and use it.