How to deal with inactive partitions in Disk Manager

I had added a new 250GB hard drive on my system. I have a 80GB IDE hard drive and it has Windows installed on it. I am using Windows XP SP2. The new hard drive has some 2 partitions. When I checked in device management I found that both are inactive. I cannot make any changes. I am a bit not able to understand the issue behind it. The drive is detected as healthy and working but somehow I am not able to make it active. The drive options are completely grayed out. Any idea how to make this active.

You can format the same through Windows installation disc. You can use Windows XP installation disc and then use to format the partition and create a new one. It looks in Windows XP you are not having right privileges to create partitions. I had faced the issue while installing new drive and I formatted that with Windows installation disc. After that it started working.

The partition when marked as inactive that means you will need to format it and make it windows readable format. The most common is NTFS and FAT32. You can use some third party formatting software which I think can help you in this. There are chances that Windows XP's Device Manager software is not working properly.

What option you are getting. Can you right click on the drive partition. If not then on the top box in Device Management you can find the number of drives listed. You can choose to format that completely and create new partitions. Doing that with the help of Windows installation disc your job become much more easier. To some extent it is not at all complicated to perform. If you are not able to do that through Device Management then try a bootable disc instead.

I know the reason behind that. The drive is detected but do not offer you rights to format it. The reason is driver. Your windows might not be having proper drivers for the hard drive. This has happened in my old windows xp laptop. I had installed a new SATA drive and the same issue appeared. I thought this is due to cable or some hardware failure. But the problem was with Sata drive. Even Windows installation disc that I own does not has any option to format it. I loaded the driver in usb drive and then updated my system. The drive was then detected. You can find the drive in Device Manager. Check there will be a error on it.

Try to use EASEUS Partition Manager. This is one of the best software which offers you a multiple features to configure storage media. I can see a set of option that allow me to configure the drive as per my need. I use it always to resize and create new partition. But do not touch your old drive. Because it has windows and if you make any changes it can crash.

Wow. That was very entertaining and even more informative. I am having trouble with using two HDD"S and think I know my problem. I know I'm the newest of noobs but, I didn't have a clue there were partition programs nor did I ever think of BIOS changing programs. Are they easy to use for noobs like me (with good resources a phone call away. My brother and best friend are grads of computer science but my questions are maybe TOO simple) lol