New HD partitioning woes

Just added a second internal 80gb hard drive, went into Windows Disk Management, selected the drive, right-clicked, and "Partition" was grayed out?! I have dual-boot so I tried it in both WinXP and Win2000, same result, both saw the drive, neither offered to partition it. I booted to a DOS utility disk that I previously made and used FDISK to partition it. Then back to Windows and no problem formatting it to NTFS (funny thing is, as I returned to Windows to format it graciously offered to delete the partition that it wouldn't even create in the first place).

Here's my dilemma. FDISK won't deal with drives larger than 127gb, and if I want to add a 300-500gb drive how do I get Windows to be willing to partition it out of the box. I understand most externals come pre-partitioned (and formatted), but I don't think that's the situation with internals. Any suggestions from those who have dealt with adding secondary large internal drives. I'm not talking about having a single large internal drive and installing Windows on it (during which it offers to partition/format the drive). I'm talking about having an existing Windows setup, and adding a brand new secondary large drive (no RAID, nothing fancy). Any idea why Windows saw the new drive but wouldn't offer the option of partitioning it? And please don't suggest Partition Magic or other 3rd party software tools, I'm interested in whether Windows has the built-in means to do the simple partitioning job. Thanks for any help.

 

rwk,

Glad you worked things out with your drive. The problem I'm talking about is not formatting, but partitioning. Before a drive can be formatted it must first be partitioned (at which time it can be setup as multiple drive letters or one big C: drive). In my multi-boot system both Windows 2000 and Windows XP recognized the existence of the new (secondary) drive but neither would partition it, the crucial first step. As I said, the partition option was there in the Disk Management utility but it was grayed out. So I ended up doing it in DOS, then booted back and let Windows do the formatting. Problem is:

1) Windows (either 2000 or XP) should have been able to partition the drive

2) DOS is limited in drive size (127gb) that it can partition

 

Hey kiwi,

I've only got 3 on the first, so that doesn't impact things regarding partitioning the second.

 

Don't quite follow. As I've said I've got a multi-boot setup (on the first drive) and can boot into Win2000 or WinXP. Are you suggesting that I ignore those and instead boot from a Win2000 or WinXP setup CD as if I were going to install Windows? Hmmm, might just work. Pretend that I'm going to install Windows on the second (new) drive, it'll see that it's not partitioned and probably offer to partition it. Then I could also have it go ahead and format it right there. Of course when that was done I'd have to immediately cancel the next step as I have no interest installing anything on that second drive.

Although it sounds a bit roundabout it might just work, thanks. Seems strange that neither existing version of Windows (already installed on my first drive) won't just partition the bloody new second drive. I still think that's possible and I'm overlooking something...