Usually windows will say when you open disk manager "one or more disk(s) need to be initialised" you are then left with a list of the disks not initialized and you can tick the ones you want to initialize, click "OK" and it does it for you.

In reply to a post by meditator:

To the left of the colour-coded partition(s) of the various discs, you'll see one or more grey rectangles with labels such as Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM 0, CD-ROM 1, etc., basically describing the installed memory devices. It's this rectangle which, when you right-click on it for a newly-added bare drive, reveals a menu, one item of which is 'Initialise the Disk'.

That makes sense! One Initialises (back to factory state) a whole disk, but Formats (High-Level) just a partition.

Pipexer,

We're talking about WinXP 32-bit here, and as far as my experience with it goes, there's no built-in Disk Manager in which disks can be initialised. Do please point out my error, if I'm wrong about this.

In reply to a post by meditator:

Pipexer,

We're talking about WinXP 32-bit here, and as far as my experience with it goes, there's no built-in Disk Manager in which disks can be initialised. Do please point out my error, if I'm wrong about this.

Start > Right click "My Computer" > Manage > Storage > Disk Management
or Start > Run > compmgmt.msc > Storage > Disk Management

I am pretty sure this exists on XP

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by meditator:

To the left of the colour-coded partition(s) of the various discs, you'll see one or more grey rectangles with labels such as Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-ROM 0, CD-ROM 1, etc., basically describing the installed memory devices. It's this rectangle which, when you right-click on it for a newly-added bare drive, reveals a menu, one item of which is 'Initialise the Disk'.

That makes sense! One Initialises (back to factory state) a whole disk, but Formats (High-Level) just a partition.

Initialize in Windows is simply writing an MBR and blank partition table afaik.. Only takes a few seconds..

I have seen similar problems with xp and usb to sata drives, and hot-swapping getting confused.
try restarting the machine it is connected to

Indeed , it does !

Have used it once or twice.

- Alex

Pipexer,

I've obviously looked again in DIsk Management in WinXP again but I've been unable to see a Disk Manager folder or section anywhere (apart from, of course, the main Disk Management graphic).

I'm on about this; http://i52.tinypic.com/2qs712p.png

The pseudo-DOS environment of Ghost 2003 is known to be flakey with different implementations of external USB, so I guess this is why Ghost won't fully launch. So I'm pretty well stuffed, as far as doing Disk-to-Disk cloning's concerned.

As long as you have at least one Seagate drive on your system, you may be able to clone to the external drive using their DiscWizard program, based on Acronis:
KP