One new hard drive showing up as E and F drives.

[Capholland]

Not exactly audio or video related, but still a hardware problem. I was running out of storage space, and managed to get ahold of an older 20Gig hard drive to add to my system.

It wasn't formatted, and I had to right click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage" to get to the "Disk Management" window where I could format the drive and activate the partition. Already having a partitioned drive (C + D) I picked the drive letter "E" for this new drive when I was asked.

The problem is, when the format (for the whole drive as a single partition) was just about completed the computer flashed a message saying "Drive letter already in use. Choosing another one." (Or something similar to that, anyway.) The result is that, ever since, I have an almost identical E and an F drive in my Explorer and Disk Defragmenter programs which appear to be pointing to the same physical hard disk.

And this duality is causing problems all around (especially when it comes to having deleted files in the recycle bin on the D or E/F drives) to where I've started running CHKDSK on all drives (C + D + E/F) almost every boot to be greeted with messages like "fixing unused index entries" and "recovering orphaned file fragment" and "fixing mirror copy of the security descriptors data stream" and "replacing invalid security id" and "correcting errors in the master file table (MFT) BITMAP attribute" etc.

Anybody know what might have caused this identity crisis with this new hard drive, and most of all, what I can do to correct it?

- Capholland
http://caphollands.fsgateway.com

My computer system:
AMD 800MHZ
294 MB RAM
NVIDIA GEFORCE 2 MX/MX400
Windows 2000 SP 3

[FatTulip]

Could be that they are sharing the IDE with your CD / other HDD, in which case things can get messed up.

I had a similar problem on a PC under Win98 when installing an internal Zip drive. My solution was to get a PCI adapter with 4 x IDE slots on it (£30). This gave me fresh channels and mean the two most important drives were unhindered.

[Trev]

What I think you have done is, that you think you have formated the whole drive but in fact you haven't, only the first partition. You have to get rid of the partition first before you format. To do that I think you have to fdisk it. You run this from dos.

Trevor:)

[Capholland]

Thanks for the reply. The drive does have only one partion. In the meantime, the problem has been fixed. In trying to fix it myself, I screwed up a few other things, and had to a Windows 2000 Repair install. Thankfully, the hard drives now seem to be getting along just great with each other, and a few other irritations I was just enduring have also been eradicated.

[rispon30]

What I would come from this was your CD or DVD drive or whatever is installed was already using the E: designation. When you tried to set up your new hard drive with the E: it "confused" Windows. As you were trying to use E: for two devices. Glad you got it fixed though.. :)