NAS Hard Disk,Wireless Router Queries

I am here to answer a couple of queries from we have had on our Ask-Us page that gives you the liberty to ask all your hardware related queries and get their solutions right here on this blog.

The first query is by John :

Hi,

I bought 2 500gb hd for my NAS 200. Because of its slow speeds, i decided it was best to put them back in my main tower. However to my sad surprise, windows would not recognize them. I recalled that the NAS took the liberty to format my hdd to an unreadable format.

Is there a way to format them back to ntfs form? or ideally access them whilist in my pc?

Thanks

John

Yes you can easily format the hard disk back to NTFS/FAT32 partition. As you are using windows just go Disk Management which is there is Right Click My Computer>Manage and in the left pane you will find the Disk Management option.

In the bottom pane you will find all you external drives listed there if they are installed properly and are getting detected by BIOS.

You will also see the unrecognized partitions when you click on the NAS Hard Disk. You can then format them to the desired format by right clicking on the partition and selecting format.

If by chance, that does not work, you can download the GParted Live CD which is especially made for this purpose and you can boot into the Live CD and format the Hard Disk to the desired format.

The second question is by Jake :

Hi,

I posted this question under the Linksys article. anyway, can you teach me how to setup that wireless router so that i could connect both my desktop and laptop in the DSL connection at the same time. (laptop using the wireless connection, and desktop, since it is located nearest the router, a LAN cable)
is this possible?

Thanks!
Jake

You need to just enter the username and password of your Broadband connection to get things started and your net connection will be up and running. You might need to get some settings like PVC etc from your provider. After that you need to secure your wireless connection, so go to wireless settings of your router and set a passkey. This is valid if you have a ADSL+Wi-Fi router.

You can then connect both laptop and desktop PC and you basically do not need to do anything extra to run them simultaneously. After setting it up as told above, you just need to plug in the LAN cable from your Desktop to router and turn on Wi-Fi on your laptop and connect to the network by entering the password and you are done!

The bandwidth gets shared between the two connections, so heavy usage on one PC limits the bandwidth on other one. But if you have a separate DSL Modem and separate wireless router then need to plug in Ethernet cable from DSL modem to Wi-Fi router, so you will lose out on the LAN port used to connect to Desktop PC unless your DSL modem has more than one.

If it has only one then it makes sense to buy a Wi-Fi router that has is ADSL compatible, ie. it is basically two-in-one and your DSL modem will not be of use then. You can also get a splitter but it will only add to cost and it has its own set of issues.

If you are on lookout on detailed tutorial on setting up the wireless router with the DSL modem then it is coming up this week itself, so keep checking this blog.