New Hard Drive but No Letter

[Vic]

I added a new Seagate 80G hard drive to my wife's computer. No drive letter
comes up for it in My Computer. It shows the new hard drive in bios and
device manager. I set the drive as slave and old one is master. The master
drive is 40GB. What could be my problem?

 

[RonK]

Right click My Computer, Manage , then Disk Management.

You can format it there and it will assign a drive letter.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Right-click on MY COMPUTER and select MANAGE.
In the Computer Management window, click once on
Disk Management, then from the Toolbar select:
Action > Rescan Disks

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

Get Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies:
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| I added a new Seagate 80G hard drive to my wife's computer. No drive letter
| comes up for it in My Computer. It shows the new hard drive in bios and
| device manager. I set the drive as slave and old one is master. The master
| drive is 40GB. What could be my problem?

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Just buy installing a new hard drive does not mean it is ready to be used in
XP. You will need to use "Disk Management" and set up a partition, format
it (as NTFS) and assign a drive letter.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Vic.

"Drive" letter is a misnomer, left over from the days when HDs were much
smaller and we never partitioned them into multiple volumes. We never
assign a letter to a physical drive, but to the individual volumes (even if
only one) that we create on the drive.

As the others have said, use Disk Management to recognize the physical
drive, then create one or more partitions (and logical drives, if you create
an extended partition). Then you can assign a "drive" letter to each
primary partition (and each logical drive) and format each such volume.

RC

 

[Vic]

Thanks guys for you're input. Disk Manage did the trick. Transferring files
into the new hard drive as we speak.

Vic

 

[Guest]

Thanks guys for you're input. Disk Manage did the trick. Transferring files
into the new hard drive as we speak.

Vic

Vic, I was able to get to this point without help, but now I want to make the new drive bootable and transfer windows and all programs. My old drive is a 20gb and my new one is a 200gb. but all my programs are on the "C" 20 drive and I want to put everything (files, programs et al) on the "F" 200 drive. I see that if I do that then I could change the drive names, but is it a simple drag and paste feature?
Jimmie