2nd Hard Drive installed but doesn't appear under "My Computer"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Juse
  • Start date Start date
J

Juse

I installed a 2nd hard drive (an old Western Digital AC36400L purchased in
1998) on my computer running WinXP. The BIOS recognizes it, the Device
Manager recognizes it, but it doesn't appear under "My Computer."

MY QUESTION: How do I get Windows to recognize this hard drive and label it
under "My Computer"?

NOTES:
1) Of course I've considered that I may have installed the hard drive wrong.
I've double-checked all the physical aspects of the installation and it
still does the same thing.

2) In case it helps, I did a full PC scan using PC Pitstop. Here is the link
so you can see the results:
http://www.pcpitstop.com/techexpress.asp?id=630T9WVEL0USTCN7

3) I wanted to just try downloading an updated driver from Western Digital,
but I couldn't understand what exactly to download on their web site. Here's
a link to their software support section. http://support.wdc.com/ If you can
tell me exactly what file to download, that would also be helpful because I
am clueless!

It sucks knowing just enough about computers to get yourself in trouble.
DOH!

Thanks,
Jussi
 
Hi Juse,

It may be that the 2nd hard drive does not contain any partitions, so it has
no drive letter designation(s) to appear under My Computer.

While in XP, go to Start>Run and key in:
compmgmt.msc
Click on OK or hit ENTER

When the Computer Management window opens, in the left-hand pane, under
Storage, click on Disk Management.

In the right-hand pane, in the lower section, look for the reference to the
2nd drive (probably will be Disk 1). If it shows the drive as being
Unallocated or Unpartitioned, you can create a partition on the drive by
right-clicking in the grey area where it shows Unallocated or Unpartitioned
and then select the option to Create Partition. This should bring up the
Create Partition Wizard which you can follow in order to create a partition.



Regards,
 
Juse said:
MY QUESTION: How do I get Windows to recognize this hard drive and
label it under "My Computer"?
Click to expand...

Go to Start menu, Run, and type in "diskmgmt.msc". This will launch Disk
Management, use of which is fairly self explanatory. Find your drive in the
list of physical disks at the bottom. Look at the drive map.

If you see empty space, create a new volume and format it.

If you see a FAT or NTFS volume, you can try to assign it a drive letter --
although usually Windows would have done that already if it was going to
work.

If you see an unknown volume, you can delete it first and then create a new
one.

Note that this will destroy any data that may already be on the drive. If
your purpose was to retrieve something from it, you will probably want to
investigate why Windows isn't recognizing the existing partition. There
could be various reasons for that, most likely one being that it was created
using something like Ontrack Disk Managager to overcome BIOS limitations
common in those days.
 
Thanks to both Patti & Chris... Problem solved!


Juse said:
MY QUESTION: How do I get Windows to recognize this hard drive and
label it under "My Computer"?
Click to expand...

Go to Start menu, Run, and type in "diskmgmt.msc". This will launch Disk
Management, use of which is fairly self explanatory. Find your drive in the
list of physical disks at the bottom. Look at the drive map.

If you see empty space, create a new volume and format it.

If you see a FAT or NTFS volume, you can try to assign it a drive letter --
although usually Windows would have done that already if it was going to
work.

If you see an unknown volume, you can delete it first and then create a new
one.

Note that this will destroy any data that may already be on the drive. If
your purpose was to retrieve something from it, you will probably want to
investigate why Windows isn't recognizing the existing partition. There
could be various reasons for that, most likely one being that it was created
using something like Ontrack Disk Managager to overcome BIOS limitations
common in those days.
 
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