Can't run Disk Management after installing SATA

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Good day to all.

Just installing a brand new 2 TB drive in my older IBM ThinkCentre – running Windows XP Pro SP3. This drive is being installed as a data drive only – the original drive will remain as the boot drive. I want to create a single partition that uses the full capacity of the drive.

However, I now can’t run the Disk Management snapin – I get the error message “The Disk Management console failed to connect to the remote computer because the Disk Management remote service is not in the Windows Firewall exception list. Add the Disk Management remoting service (dmremote.exe) to the Windows Firewall exception list and try again.”

Power down the computer, unplug the SATA data connector, reboot, its all good.

Power down, re-connect the SATA drive, above error message occurs.

This is one of WD’s new “green” drives with EARS. I *think* that means that it uses 4k sector sizes instead of 512 byte sectors.

Anyway, I don’t know what to try next.

What I have done so far:

The drive has a label that says: “Windows XP single partition – set jumper on pins 7&8 before installation or use WD Align SW”. My first kick at the cat was with the jumper installed. When that failed, I powered the system down and removed the jumper. Rebooted, downloaded and ran the WD Align software from WD. The software says that the drive is already aligned and exits cleanly. No better either way: with jumper installed or without.

Added c:windowssystem32dmadmin.exe to the windows firewall programs exceptions list (as per a suggestion from a Google search). Did not help but I have not yet removed the exception.

Tried finding “dmremote.exe” – that file does not exist on my computer.

Fired up Device Manager, browsed to the drives section, selected the new WD drive. The General tab says that the device is working correctly, the Volumes tab shows that the drive is empty. Clicking on the “Populate” button gives me the error message “Volume information for this disk cannot be found. This may happen if the disk is a 1394 or a USB device on a Windows 2000 machine”. Clicking on the Drver tab shows that the driver is the original Microsoft driver dating back from 7/1/2001. Clicking on Update Driver and allowing Windows to search (online) for the best driver has no results – it comes back saying that the current driver is already the best driver.

Looked at the error message again – thought about it a bit. Went and turned Windows Firewall OFF. Figured: if its a firewall issue, get rid of the firewall (temporarily). Didn’t help – now I get a different error message: “The system cannot find the file specified”. The bottom of the Disk Management screen says “Unable to connect to Logical Disk Manager service”. Turned Windows Firewall back on again.

Tried a handful of other suggestions but nothing has helped yet.

Has anyone run into this yet? Any suggestions I might try?

Many thanks!

dwayne

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i don’t think XP’s disk management feature can handle your WD 2TB hard drive or greater, Dwayne (maybe a 1TB).
you may have to partition the drive with 3rd party disk utilities like Partition Magic instead.

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Clicking on the Drver tab shows that the driver is the original Microsoft driver dating back from 7/1/2001. Clicking on Update Driver and allowing Windows to search (online) for the best driver has no results – it comes back saying that the current driver is already the best driver.

If the drivers are really from the 2001 era, it’s pre-SATA. Is your older drive an IDE or SATA? if it’s IDE, you must go to BIOS or Setup when booting up to enable the SATA settings but since this is an HP machine, there might not have such a setting. Going back to HP will not help much because traditionally, HP do not have support for old systems as far as my experience can recall.

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Well, I guess that I have fixed the problem.

I spent a couple of evenings trying everything that I could think of as well as pretty much everything that I could find by searching the ‘Net. Nothing worked – but the problem got worse: now I couldn’t run Disk Management even with the new 2TB SATA drive disconnected.

Time for drastic action: re-install the C partition from the Image that I had made when re-building the computer the last time. But before I did that, I imaged the C partition as it was now sitting – so that I could either restore it if I wanted, or just to be able to pull files off that I hadn’t backed up. Then I took the opportunity to make the “C” partition larger – it had started off at 8GB and I was decidedly tight on space after I installing Corel Office X4 a couple of months ago. Easus Partition Master worked well – I shrunk the “D” partition by 4GB and added that to the “C” partition.

As usual, Acronis True Image worked flawlessly. Reinstalled the Image taken back in 2007. Connected the new 2TB drive and used the Disk Management snap-in to initialize and format it. Yep – Disk Management is working properly.

Downloaded and installed SP3, then installed all the rest of the Microsoft patches that had accumulated since then. And did all of the other updates that needed to be done: Java, Flash, etc. All the while, I kept checking to make sure that Disk Management was still working – it was. Took a new Image to be used as my new baseline, then started installing all of the apps that I had installed over the past 3 years. 2 new printers, newer version of Opera, current versions of Chrome and Firefox. Installed Corel Office X4. Got my wife’s version of Eudora working again (she has her own data folder)…Gosh – there’s a LOT of stuff that got installed over the past 3 years.

And – the Disk Management snap-in is still working.

My computer now seems to be running normally. I’ve got a few more apps to install, then I’ll take a final Image just so that I can get back to this state easily should the need arise.

So: it looks as if the root cause of my problem was that SOMETHING got hosed in the OS. I truly have no idea what, but at least its not a hardware limitation. My new drive is working flawlessly – I’m using it to stream media over my home network to my TV.

I wanted to say “Thanks” for the suggestions and to let everyone know that there is hope for older hardware – this brand-new SATA drive with 4k sectors is working perfectly.

dwayne

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