HELP! my hard drive formatting not sticking

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (More info?)

When does Disk Management show concerning the capacity and partitions
on the external drive?

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 04:30:28 -0700, "Zeeman"
<anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>thought the 2 partitions on my new hard drive got
>formatted cause I "tested" by copying some file to both
>partitions and saw them on BOTH partitions and observed
>when clicked "Propertie" for BOTH, saw tabs called
>(1) "Sharing" & (2) "Quota", whatever those
>are/significance, I don't know yet/understand. Then
>proceeded to rename BOTH, also in the "Properties dialog
>box" (the names that the partitioning AND formatting
>program gave the 2 partitions were generic-sounding names
>(like DRIVE2Vol#1 & DRIVE2Vol2, cause I hooked it up as
>an INTERNAL drive to a computer running WinXP Home
>Edition SP1. The new drive was the only hard drive other
>than the other drive that's already in the computer
>running as the bootup drive (in other words, I hooked it
>up on the same cable as the bootup drive, using the spare
>connector that was hanging off of the cable...so I
>jumpered the new drive as a SLAVE drive (in a 2 drives on
>1 cable, which presumably is the PRIMARY channel cable)).
>
>Thinking I liked what I saw, I turned off PC, removed
>hard drive, jumpered it as a "SINGLE" drive by removing
>the jumper-thingy and put it in my EXTERNAL case that has
>BOTH FireWire/USB 2.0 interfaces and hooked it back to
>the same WinXP computer I used to format it, except this
>time using USB. Turned it on after the computer, ONLY 1
>partition is usable, by which I mean
>
>(1) the "DRIVE2Vol2" lost that name and now takes on yet
>still another generic-sounding name "Local Disk" and when
>I
>(2) clicked "Properties" for the partition that lost its
>name, the 2 previously observed tabs above are not there
>anymore, and
>(3) when I double clicked on it to find the files I
>copied to it when it was an INTERNAL drive, those files
>weren't there and Windows asked me if I "wanted to format
>the drive?" I'm not sure if I should click "Yes" button
>to format it or not........thus I'm here in this forum
>(AND I THOUGHT THE ABOVE MENTIONED PARTITIONING &
>FORMATTING SOFTWARE THAT COMES WITH THE DRIVE SHOULD HAVE
>FORMATTED IT--ALREADY!!!)
>
>Now for some details, the HD is a WD 250GB Caviar and the
>software that came with it is WD Data Lifeguard Tool
>v11.0 version for Windows (vs. for DOS). I partitioned 2
>equal partitions. The sizes shown before I removed it to
>make into EXTERNAL HD were 116GB x 2 (BTW, should I have
>only this much GB as usable after formatting?
>18GB "lost", not usable for my own data? Is this
>common?). When it's an EXternal drive, only 1 partitions
>of 116GB shows up......the other "missing" asks if I want
>to format it? HEEEEEEEEELP please!!!! Thank you! (Oh,
>BTW, the SW asked me if I wanted to use the drive
>as "additional data drive" or "a bootable drive"....or
>something along those lines.)