CompactDrive PSD PD7X Serial Review Part 2 of 3

CompactDrive PSD PD7X Serial Review
Part 2
of 3

Ok, all ready to go. I turned it on, and… Uh oh. Frowning face and an error #10. I look this up in the manual. Appearently the CompactDrive PSD PD7X can’t format a hard drive, the drive has to be formatted before installation, and the drive has to be formatted FAT32. Since the hard drive is brand new, it has not been formatted or partitioned yet. There is only one thing to do: take the drive out and format it properly, then reinstall it.

Out comes the drive. To format it, it must be installed in a PC and formatted. Since it is a laptop drive, it has to either go into a laptop, or you can use a 2.5" to 3.5" Hard drive adapter ($5-$10). Fortunately I have one on hand for this kind of thing.

Here is the adapter on the laptop drive.

I put the drive in a removable drive bay. These are easier to use than opening up the whole PC every time you want to add or remove a hard drive.

The drive tray is inserted into the drive bay.

Then you lock it into place, and turn on the PC.

Inside Windows XP Disk Manager, the new drive shows up. Below are the steps to partition and format the drive.

Here is the next problem: FAT32 is not an option for formatting the drive. A quick check with Microsoft TechNet confirms it: Windows XP will not format a partition larger than 32GB with FAT32. Windows will only format NTFS on a 60GB drive. If I want to use the entire capacity of this drive on the CompactDrive PSD PD7X, I will have to use Windows 98, Linux, or something else to format the drive FAT32. Well, I don’t have any Win98 machines laying around, and I don’t feel like installing Linux just for this, so that leaves…