How to initialize a harddrive under WinXpPro

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I have added a hard drive to my system. It is present in the Device Manager
and so I assume that all is installed correctly(drive is attached to a sunix
3700 IDE controller PCI card as all the other IDE port on the motherboard is
used by extra CDRW drives in the machine. I have installed the drivers for
the card) and under the properties (volumes tab, I think) it shows as "not
initialized" I have looked around and can not find any obvious way of doing
this. I have not installed a hard drive under a windows operating system
before Any help appreciated.
 
craig254 said:
I have added a hard drive to my system. It is present in the Device
Manager
and so I assume that all is installed correctly(drive is attached to a
sunix
3700 IDE controller PCI card as all the other IDE port on the motherboard
is
used by extra CDRW drives in the machine. I have installed the drivers for
the card) and under the properties (volumes tab, I think) it shows as
"not
initialized" I have looked around and can not find any obvious way of
doing
this. I have not installed a hard drive under a windows operating system
before Any help appreciated.
Click to expand...

Open "Disk Management" from within "Computer Management" (in Control Panel -
Administrative Tools). This should prompt you to initialize and format the
drive. If not, right-click the drive and do it manually.
 
craig254 said:
I have added a hard drive to my system. It is present in the Device Manager
and so I assume that all is installed correctly(drive is attached to a sunix
3700 IDE controller PCI card as all the other IDE port on the motherboard is
used by extra CDRW drives in the machine. I have installed the drivers for
the card) and under the properties (volumes tab, I think) it shows as "not
initialized" I have looked around and can not find any obvious way of doing
this. I have not installed a hard drive under a windows operating system
before Any help appreciated.
Click to expand...

On the Windows XP control panel double click Administrative Tools

In administrative Tools window double click Computer Management

In the left pane of the Computer Management window expand Storage (click
the adjacent plus sign) and click Disk Management. You can then
partition hard drives and format the partitions on the context menus
(right click) for the objects in the lower section of the right pane.
 
Thanks, that did it. I am not a big user of windows and don't really know my
way around the system.

One other question though is how many dirves can I put in the machine?
there are no extra drive bays but with the Sunix card I could add three more
using IDE cables with an extra pin set on them, I would need to use a couple
of Y-power cables to route power to the extra drives. Is this safe? what
sort of limits would the power supply to the machine have? there is space on
the floor of the tower case to sit and with some modification bolt extra
drives to. Are there reasons to not do this? (computer exploding) Is there
another forum that I should ask this Question in?

thanks Again
 
DJ Borell said:
Open "Disk Management" from within "Computer Management" (in Control Panel -
Administrative Tools). This should prompt you to initialize and format the
drive. If not, right-click the drive and do it manually.
Click to expand...

To add: Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk
Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive. R-click
Unallocated space, Create partition
 
craig254 said:
Thanks, that did it. I am not a big user of windows and don't really know my
way around the system.

One other question though is how many dirves can I put in the machine?
there are no extra drive bays but with the Sunix card I could add three more
using IDE cables with an extra pin set on them, I would need to use a couple
of Y-power cables to route power to the extra drives. Is this safe? what
sort of limits would the power supply to the machine have? there is space on
the floor of the tower case to sit and with some modification bolt extra
drives to. Are there reasons to not do this? (computer exploding) Is there
another forum that I should ask this Question in?

thanks Again
Click to expand...

You would need to determine the power consumption, in each voltage
range, of your various computer components. Include the motherboard,
CPU, cooling fans, perepheral cards and disk drives. Check the label on
your power supply to see how many Watts it can handle. If the components
you want to add push the total power requirements over the supply's
capacity you may need to replace the power supply with a more powerfull
unit. Be aware that many systems are built with fairly modest power
supplys that can't handle very many extra drives.

If you add many drives inside your computer you should consider
additional case ventilation fans. Late model hard drives generate
significant amounts of heat that can drive the tempreture of your
computer case up. I've heard recommendations from people I trust that
hard drives should be installed with empty spaces betwen them so that
air can circulate betwen them better. There are also special adaptors on
the market that not only allow 3 1/4 inch hard drives to be installed in
5 1/4 floppy/CD bays, the adaptors include tiny fans to cool the hard drive.

If the added cabinets and cables aren't a concern you could also add
external USB 2.0 or firewire drives that are equiped with their own AC
to DC converters.
 
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