installing a second hard drive

gartht799

Baseband Member
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37
Hello,

I just installed a second hard drive on my Dell PC which uses Windows XP. I cannot get the second drive to be listed under "my computer" and the otption to use it when saving a file is not there. It installed okay, and when I checked the system using F2 setup, both hard drives were recognized. I also did a IDE diagnostic and both hard drives passed. Finally when I went to the device manager in windows both hard drives were listed (primary and secondary) and windows said that both hard drives were working probably. Everything else on the PC works correctly. Anyone have any idea why windows won't recognize the drive and why I can't use it? Thanks
 
im not entirely sure on this but i think that it just needs to be partitioned then you can format it from windows and ill be usable
 
Right ok what you have to do is the following:

Go into the control panel and find Administrative Tools
Next go into the computer management utility
Expand the storage tab and select disk management
You will have two disks Disk 0 and Disk 1

Right click on the second unformatted drive and select formatset the file system to NTFS, check the perform quick format box or you will have to wait ages for the disk to do a full level format and that should be you sorted

Any problems just post back
 
He said it was a new drive, so providing that he format the new drive he won't loose anything becuse there is nothing to loose on it in the first place. Plus windows won't let you format the drive or partition with windows on it so it is a pretty safe process
 
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