The active partition is the boot partition and usually contains the
operating system. There is no neeed for an active partition on this
drive unless you intend to boot from it.
I don't think this would prevent it from being seen in the console. Does
the drive show when installed in the USB case? If you right-click one of
the partitions, can you use the "Explore" option?


Bob Lendrim wrote:

>Thanks for telling me about the XP Disk Manager. I used it to create two primary Fat32 partitions of 31 & 27 Gigs. The drive is seen by Device Manager as Maxtor 6Y060P0. The two partitions are seen in the Disk Manager and labelled "Healthy". I made one "Active", but don't know what that means.
>
>BUT they are not shown in "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer".
>The drive in question is in a HD drawer connected to a separate controller, Silicon Image SIL0680 Ultra-133 Medley ATA Raid controller". Two other hard drives, a 40G NTFS and a 60G Fat32, still work fine in that draw. Do I have to do something else to make these partitions useable?
>Thanks, Bob
>
>
>You can do all this with XP's disk mangement tool. (Right-click My
>Computer/Manage/Disk Management.).
>Your unformatted USB drive will be recognized (Just look for a new drive
>in the console, I forget the terminology)
>Form there, just right-click the drive and select the options you want.
>This procedure and the command line version are explained in XP Help and
>Support.
>
>Bob Lendrim wrote:
>
>
>>I want to FDisk a 60 Gig HD into two partitions, and format them as Fat32. I plan to do the Fdisk/format job in a drawer, as a slave in my P4 XP SP2 NTFS machine.  Then I want to put the new drive in an external USB case and use it with a variety of machines, one is PII, one PIII. They are of limited drive capacity but I know will read 30Gigs. I'm hoping they will read the 60 Gig external USB drive as two 30 Gig drives.
>>
>>Does all this sound possible and what problems am I likely to have?
>>Can I Fdisk and format from XP command prompt or do I need a boot disk?
>>I've never made two partitions on a drive before.
>>
>>
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