How to reformat former C drive?

I made a image of my C drive onto another drive. Then installed a new HD and copied the image of my former C drive to the new drive. All went perfect.
Now I would like to reformat my original C drive. I put it in an external HD enclosure and connected it via my eSata port. The computer won't work when I do that. The mouse pointer will barely move and I can not do anything. I assume the computer is seeing two C drives and locks up. How can I reformat this former C HD? Also do I have to shut the computer off to connect or disconnect a HD using the eSata cable?

 

Have you changed the jumper settings on that hard drive and make it a slave. It may be that your computer is trying to boot from 2 master drivers and it is only allowed to boot from one. Also check the boot order, you may have a conflict there

 

No I didn't change the jumpers. What about unplugging the eSata with computer running?

 

There are no jumpers installed on the drive. I hope it doesn't need any jumpers because I don't have any.

 

I wouldn't recommend unplugging any hard drive from your computer while it's running unless you use the softly remove tool

 

Your hard drive is probably factory set to master, however depending on the cable you are using to connect it as an external , that may be causing your problem. Some cables are preselected ( probably using the wrong term) as primary and when the HD is booted it will read it from that cable first.

Hang on and someone more qualified may come through and post a solution or steps you can use to get you to a happy resolution

 

I recommend that you start the computer up without the external drive attached to see if that is the problem. If it is, then you could use a program like gparted (google it) to reformat the drive.

From my experience having an external drive with an OS on should not conflict with any other OS. If you can, attempt to get into "My Computer" with both drives attached to see if they are both recognised,

 

Hi Burnum,

Bug is correct. To simplify: 80 wire cables are usually Cable Select (CS) But, can be both CS or Master/Slave. For CS both drives on the same cable must be jumpered CS and the position on the cable determines which is Master and which is Slave. Usually printed on the cable or color coded. End is usually Master and middle is Slave. Master/Slave is plugged as such and position on the cable does not matter. Master will always be the lower drive letter. Same applies for 40 wire cables but, they are usually Master/Slave only. Same applies to the secondary IDE port. Hope this helps a little.

Good Luck, Jim

 

OK, got it figured out. I had the wrong power supply connected to the external enclosure. Once I had the correct power supply everything went as normal. I opened the box and put the former c drive in and everything worked fine. So then I started looking for why my external enclosure wasn't working correctly. I put another drive in and it locked up the computer also. So then started looking for the reason. I must have grabbed the wrong power supply plug out of the box I had it stored in. Sorry for the false alarm. It was kind of dumb of me.