Installing an additional hard drive

[Guest]

I just hooked up a second hard drive. It is a Western Digital Caviar SE 320
MB SATA drive. It is exactly the same modelas the drive that I installed
Vista Home Premium on. When I hooked it up Windows automatically installed
the drivers for it and told me that it was ready to use. When I looked for
the drive it does not appear in the "Computer" (used to be "My Computer" in
XP) section. I have rebooted and the hard drive shows up in the BIOS. Why
doesn't Vista recognize that I added a second hard drive even though it
installed the dirvers for it?

 

[Guest]

If it's never been formatted, you need to format it. Go to disk management,
find the drive, format it, the system will automatically assign it a drive
letter. You'll be able to see it in disk management but I'll be it won't
have a drive letter assigned.

 

[R. C. White, MVP]

Hi, KyussTool.

This sounds like a job for...Disk Management! (diskmgmt.msc - or see below)

Windows Explorer ("Computer") does not show hard drives. It only shows
partitions on those drives. You must first create one or more partitions on
your new drive, format it, and assign it a "drive" letter - and I recommend
that you also assign it a volume label, so that you can recognize it even if
the letter gets changed somehow.

Right-click on Computer, then click Manage | Disk Management. Spend some
time getting familiar with this utility and its Help file; what you learn
will benefit you today and many times in your future use of computers and
disk drives. The default View is to show the Volume List at the top and the
Graphical View below. You won't see your unpartitioned new drive in the
Volume List, but you should see it below - probably as Disk 1, since
numbering starts with Disk 0.

Right-click in the graphics box to the right of the Disk 1 icon and choose
New simple volume. The Wizard will guide you through creation of a
partition, which you can then format and assign a letter and label. Then
that Drive letter will show up in Computer.

Disk Management was in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but many users never
found it. It replaced Fdisk, Format.exe and other tools that we used in
MS-DOS and Win9x.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Mail in Vista Ultimate x64)

 

[Guest]

I located the disk in disk management and formatted it. I even assigned it
the letter "F". The next time that I rebooted the computer the hard drive
vanished. It doesn't show up in Disk Management or anywhere else except
Norton 360. Norton shows it on the list of devices to backup to. However,
it shows the drive as unavailable.

Where did my hard drive go and how do I get it back?

Ryan