Hard drive not mounting? Won't show up.

O

oregon

Active Member
I got the new hard drive today, installed it etcetera, and when Vista loaded it recognized it and asked me to format. I did this, but it failed. Now it won't show up in Windows explorer though it does show up in device manager and others. How do I format it correctly?
 
Go into the "Control Panel>Administative Tools>Computer Management>Storage" and double click on that to select the Disk Management tool. Once that opens look for the drive showing the large amount of unallocated drive space. That will appear darker then the rest except for an optical drive with disk in it.

Right click on it to select the create new partition option to see if you can create one there. Is this being seen on a sata or ide type drive?
 
It is sata. It shows up there, but when try to create a partition I get the message "disk has not been initialized". What does that mean?
 
Check to make sure the power plug is in. Windows will detect a drive with the data cable while not being to do anything with it if it isn't running. That would be the first thing to look at before assuming you ended up getting a bad drive.
 
Wait, I think I found where to initialize it. For some reason you have to click the disk box in storage manager and "initialize" it before you can even format it.
 
That's a new one! Just when you think you've heard them all... :P

JOnce you left click on the item you are instructing Windows to pay attention to it having made a selection. From there you simply right click or use the pull down "actions" option seen on the menu bar to select the create new partition option. See how it goes now since you know the drive looks good.
 
Yeah, I'm partitioning now... it takes forever. Only half done and it's been going for probably an hour.
 
Partitioning only takes seconds. A full format of a newly created one will be a time grabber. That;s why most simply select the quick format option. A full format is when you want to see a partition cleaned up good.
 
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