Replacement HDD formatting issues resolved

[dunno]

I bought a new Samasung 100gig 2.5' to upgrade my 10gig Archos Recorder, and I had some head scratching moments, so I thought I'd share them with you.

The new drive was pre formatted by the manufacturer as a Dynamic Drive, this is a problem as the only OS's which see a Dynamic Drive are Win 2000 and Win xp pro, although Win xp pro could see the Hard drive xp pro cannot format the drive to FAT32 which the Archos needs. Swissknife didn't see the drive either.

I resolved the problem as follows.

1). Convert the drive back to a "Basic Drive", this is done by using Winxp pro's Disk manager, see link below for complete description, ( FF doesn't display the link porperly, use IE).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044/en-us

2). I then used Partition Magic to format the disc to FAT32. and hey presto works in my Archos.


Swissknife was of no use as it failed to see the Hard Drive in any of the formats.