HDD issues

[Maxey]

I bought this Western Digital 500 GB IDE HDD from my uncle's friend and when I plugged it on to my computer using an IDE cable, it did not show on explorer, so I went to Disk Management and it said "GPT Protective Partition" and I couldn't do anything to it.

So I googled that and stumbled upon a thread by some guy who had the same problem. One of the members told him about this program HDD Guru called HDD Low Level Formatter and the OP claimed it worked like a charm. So I dl it and use it and it seems to do a slow format, took about a hour to format, but in the end it worked well and it allowed me to mount the drive, but only in dynamic mode.

Anyway, I went like that. Formatted it on NTFS and them installed it on an external HDD case. I plug the case to the computer and turn it on, but the drive doesn't show on explorer. Turns out I have to re-activate it everytime I restart the computer. And worse, I can only copy files to it but not from it. It crashes if I try to copy files from it to the computer. When I try to convert it to basic drive, it won't allow me to mount it to a drive letter and then format it.

Help me

[Oli]

This is rather weird. The low level format should have at least completely "cleaned up" your disk so that it was sort of like a virgin. So it should be visible to your explorer.

Have you visited this link yet? http://blog.paulgu.com/2008/01/06/how-to-delete-gpt-protective-partition/

[Oli]

Also, this can clear everything up but you're going to be in for a nice read:

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

[Maxey]

Thanks Oli, I'll try that.

[Rob]

WD hard drives suck, there's your problem. My 500gb that died on me was a WD, and that's not the first time I've had one of their HDs crap out.

[Koobazaur]

Probably irrelevant, but are your pin and bios settings correct?

[Oli]

Did it work?

[Maxey]

Gonna try it today.

[Oli]

You lazy fuck, you should have tried it yesterday !

[Maxey]

Alright, shit works now. Thanks for all the help. :thumbsup:

[Oli]

What did you do? Might be usefull for others with the same problem.

[Maxey]

What did you do? Might be usefull for others with the same problem.
To be honest, it was just me being stupid. After that low-level format, I should've just done the "New partition" thing on Disk Management, but for a while there I was just associating it to creating second partitions and not with creating the main partition. I was looking for a format option elsewhere, when I suddenly remembered what to do... /facepalms

Oh, I had previously formatted it on dynamic mode, which seemed to work half-assedly, since I could only copy to it and not from it. What is the difference between basic mode and dynamic mode anyway?