HD Doctor Blog

Why is my new drive recognized in the system BIOS but has no drive letter assigned to it in Windows?

Before the operating system can recognize the drive and assign it a drive letter, you must partition and format the drive. New hard drives are rarely pre-partitioned by the manufacturer. There are three options to formatting and partitioning the drive:

• Disk Management is compatible Windows NT, 2000, and xp.
• FDISK is compatible with Windows 9x, Me. Please refer to Microsoft’s knowledge base article Q255867 for instructions on FDISK.
• Seagate’s MaxBlast and

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May 24, 2010 – Seagate announced channel and OEM shipments of the Momentus ® XT hard drive, the world’s fastest 2.5-inch laptop PC hard drive, combining SSD-like performance with the massive capacity and much lower cost of HDDs. The Momentus XT drive also features Adaptive Memory™ – a groundbreaking new technology from Seagate that learns and optimizes the drive’s performance to each user by moving frequently used information into the flash memory for faster access. The Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive boots up to 100 percent faster than traditional 5400RPM drives, the mainstream spin speed for…

This post is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity.

Reasons why hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes:

• Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode
• You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes
• Your motherboard has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the BIOS binaries
• Your PC/Laptop manufacturer has created a hidden area on your hard drive to store a backup of the Operating System installation files (needed for automatic restore functionality)
• You have used some software that sets HPA

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 Why must I use this type of cable?

The faster timing requirements of Ultra ATA/66 and above require the use of an 80-conductor cable. This is necessary for proper operation of UDMA modes 3 and greater. The 80-conductor cable is used with the same connector configuration as the standard 40-conductor cable. The 40 additional conductors are used as ground paths and are all connected to the 7 original ground conductors. These additional ground conductors serve to improve the overall signal quality (signal-to-noise ratio) of the ATA cable. 80-conductor Ultra ATA cables are also limited to a maximum cable length of…

The most popular CD Burning Softwares, detailing how to burn a disaster recovery CD from the image file saved by Retrospect.

1. Nero Burning Rom (Ahead Software):

Start Nero and close the new compilation window, file browser window, and any wizard that appears. Choose Burn Image from the File menu. In the file selection dialog, change the shown file type to All Files, navigate to the disaster recovery ISO image, select it, and click Open. Click OK if Nero informs you it does not recognize the format of the image file. Nero presents its Foreign…

What is native command queuing?

Native command queuing is arguably the most significant advancements in the Serial ATA II specification. NCQ allows the host to issue multiple commands to the device (up to 32 commands) without having to wait for the device to complete any commands. Queuing of commands allows the drive to look ahead at what data has been requested or needs to be written, thereby allowing the drive to optimize the order of the commands and maximize data throughput efficiency, providing significant performance improvement.

To enable Native Command Queuing, the Serial ATA II standard defines a…

 Blue Screen stop messages provide diagnostic information, such as Stop codes and driver names, that you can use to resolve the problem. However, this information disappears when you restart your computer. Therefore, it is important to record the information displayed for future reference.

The following are a list of the more common stop codes and potential resolutions in windows:

1. Stop 0x0000000A or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
2. Stop 0x0000001E or KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
3. Stop 0×00000024 or NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM
4. Stop 0x0000002E or DATA_BUS_ERROR
5. Stop 0x0000003F or NO_MORE_SYSTEM_PTES
6. Stop 0×00000050 or PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
7. Stop 0×00000077 or KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
8. Stop 0×00000079 or MISMATCHED_HAL
9. Stop 0x0000007A or KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR
10. Stop 0x0000007B

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All of our new Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives and new Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives are optimized for performance, we do not have a utility that can quiet them down.

While modern drives are extremely quiet, every disc drive makes a certain amount of noise while running. Normally, the faster the drive motor spins, the higher pitched the resulting sound will be.

It is also normal for the drive to make sort of a "chattering" or "clicking" sound while it is reading and writing data.

However, if the sound coming from the area around your drive has recently…

The BIOS limitation or BIOS capacity barrier is the computer’s inability to recognize hard drive capacities larger than allowed by the hard-coded programming contained in your system BIOS. For example, your system BIOS might only be capable of understanding a hard drive capacity of up to 32 GB. If you then attempt to install and auto-detect a 40 GB hard drive, the system will freeze because the BIOS is not capable of understanding the capacity reported by the hard drive. In short, that particular BIOS cannot count past 32 GB.

Seven Major BIOS Limitations:

• Systems with BIOS dated

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To low-level format a hard drive using Drive Setup, follow these steps:

1. Start by selecting the hard drive you wish to low-level format.
2. Under the Function menu select Initialization Options…
3. Select Low Level Format (a check mark will appear) and click OK.
4. Click Initialize at the bottom of the main screen.
5. Again click Initialize.

Drive Setup will low-level format the drive and prepare it for use with the Mac OS, after which it can be loaded with software.

Note:

• Low-level formatting a hard drive will destroy all data on the drive and

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