Western Digital Caviar WD400BB 40 GB Hard Drive Logo
dipankar shome Posted on Apr 06, 2007
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Not able to load any os

D/sir/mam i am having a problem with my hard disk as a few days back i tried to load a demo version of windows vista home on my pc after loading now my hdd is not booting and i am not able to load winxp on that or win98se os......after booting from win98se bootable media i didn't find any partition in the hdd...infact it is showing "no fixed disk presents"pls advise me to recover my hdd....my pc ic p-iv 2.99ghz...with 512mb of ram..... thanx...dipankar

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The easiest way to partition this disk wud be to put the HDD into another computer that has windows vista, once done, boot up other computer then press start, run , type "compmgmt.msc" select disk management, normally there is one partition, you can do alot of things from here, create multiple partitions, shrink and extend volumes, even assign partition drive letters it look like you have more HDDs but in reality you only have one, have multiple partitions make windows vista perform better, eg partition 1 u wud put windows vista only partition 2 the page file (virtual Memory) then another partition for personal media

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Here's a fdisk utility for you to use: http://www.shareup.com/Super_Fdisk-download-18631.html That will help partition and activate drives. If you don't know how to partition a drive, then this link will help explain, in tech detail, what you are doing: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q221829/ If you want more of a layman's explanation, then goto this link: http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/weendoggy/index.htm As the person there went into detail as to what you are doing from what I think is a not-as-technical explanation as most other sites. Fdisk wipes your hard drive clear of anything when you run it, it then partitions the drives and activates the partitions so that a operating system can be installed on it. With your RAM, why did you even try to install Vista? Vista needs at least 1G of RAM for optimal performance, not to mention a good graphics card, and just overall new hardware.

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I have this exact laptop and was never happy with the speed or stability with the Vista OS. I found that after intalling windows XP, this laptop now perform optimally. If you want more information on this solution click here. (note that the drivers link in this article is temporarily down, but I will be posting an other one promptly. Booting XP from a USB drive is no fun! If you really want to have Vista on this laptop, then you might want to consider dual booting XP / Vista, I will be posting an article on that same website.
www.CustomAutomaticSystems.com
Alex
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