gents im running two seperate hard drives on my comp
packard bell 2.8ghz pentium 4 with 2gig ram
my main operating system is xp pro running on the smaller 40gig(internal) hard drive
i also have a larger 160 gig(internal) which is used for storage and movies and the like
i recently have been having trouble accessing the drive or getting information to transfer without the comp hanging or going really slow
i have now just acquired an EXTERNAL 320GIG
which im attempting to transfer the files onto
when ive got everything off which i want how do i re-format the drive
so its basically a blank again ???

cheers
nath

You can format it in Windows - go to Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management and there's a section in there called Disk Management. Right-click on the correct drive (you don't want to choose the wrong one ;)) and you can format it.

HTH,

HB

Couldn't have put it better myself :)

(and no smart comments in response to that please :p)

chris is there anything else i should be doing when running drives like this ???
i only had the drive 1/3rd full and it was complaining like mad even after being de-fragged
is there some special program i need to help the comp access things better or stop it hanging
it seems to run the explorer.exe program really really hard and just makes things impossible to work with

"Complaining" in what way?

If you're getting slowdown on folders with lots of video files or images, it's a known bug in Explorer - turning thumbnails off normally does the trick.

HB

yep thats it
thank you very much i didnt know that
thats probably whats been happening

cheers chris

you wouldnt believe how much quicker it is now ive done that