Had 250gb Hitachi Deskstar. Was using it as portable and dis not have
plate over circuitry (big mistake?).
Was working fine with my usb adapter and driver on both old and new
systems. Usb adapter and driver works fine on other drives still.

I have a 500GB external drive, connected through USB2. Recently it's
started not showing up as a drive letter under XP, until you restart it
a few times. This only happens if the drive has been turned off and you
turn it on while the computer is running. If you turn it on before

My bios will recognize this drive, so if I use a partition utility to
break it up into 100gb paritions, can I use it on a 98se system?
specs say xp/vista. it's a passport 500gb.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=569

How are these used?
http://www.cprtools.net/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=68

Sounds to me more like a recipe for on-the-fly disaster creation. But
I'm cynical.
    Yousuf Khan
Diskeeper Tech to Prevent Fragmented Files - CPUs, Boards & Components

Can one run a program like FDISK on an external USB disk?
Reason = I wish to format a USB drive to only 64 GB FAT32.
I have a recording device which writes to a USB drive,
but only handles FAT32. Now the smallest drive I can find

My limited experience with hard drives is that they can be very fragile.
Are external portable hard drives much better for durability/reliablity?
Any particular brand recommendations with good warranties?
I need about a 500gb approx. drive, external. Cool if it could be both

We need to scheduke daily back ups of certain folders to an external
USB drive. When we look at the folders (directory tree) on the USB
drive we want it to match the source tree. We do not want a compressed
file format on the destination. We would want to be able to take the

I just bought a new-in-the-box 500GB Seagate SATA drive with the same
Model# on the box as the others I have, but the Model# showing in the
BIOS screen is different from that of the others (which are different
from that on the boxes anyway).

I'm thinking of getting a solid state drive for my boot and critical
programs and the local computer guy may be getting a 60Gig as trade in for
a customer that wants to get a 120Gig.  This means I can get the 60G dirt
cheap.

I think I once read here that there is a freeware imitation of
Partition Magic, or at least something cheaper.
My current need is to take a partition that's already in use and make
it smaller so that I can carve out a small partition from the space

I have a very old computer running 98se. It's bios cannot do LBA48 and I
don't want to take the risk of updating the bios.
I tried partitioning the first 100gb of the 250gb drive into 2 50 gb
segments using some version of fdisk and I got one partition working ok

Yes  this Disk that I am trying to recover has 6 Partitions, from what I see now DOS only support 4
partitions..??
Am I correct in this thinking
So its a Sector copy program it will not matter..?

I bought a few USB 2.0 IDE enclosures on ebay for 2.5 inchdrives,
described as "new chipset" enclosures
They are very simple, and were cheap.
Curiously both have failed at the same time after about a year of not

There is this system partition 1 with deleted mbr,both Fat tables
probably and possibly some files possibly fragmented .However in
norton disk editor/advanced recovery when you play with sectors per
fat and other numbers you get to see a root directory and folders in