New Hard Drive Help

C

cheburns

New Member
I just put my second WD 400GB drive in my computer and it doesn't recognize it in my computer. It shows up in the BIOS and in PC Wizard and in Device Manager but do I have to format it or something? Why can't I see it in my comp?
 
Go to computer management and partition it and format, right click on My Computer, click manage, then click on disk management, then right click on the new drive at the bottom.
 
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Windows won't see a drive in MyComputer or Windows Explorer until partitioned and formatted as a logical drive. The Disk Management tool found in "Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage" will show the drive and total unallocated drive space available.

You can simply right click there to create one or more partitions and later format the one or more. Another option is to use a drive partitioning tool like GParted live for cd to partition the drive and later use the DM to see that formatted and assigned a drive letter.
 
Another great free tool for creating new partitions on a new drive is the 0.3.3.0 platform independent version of GParted where you still need to use the DM tool for formatting any created with the free Linux Gnome Partition Editor on cd. Vista does see a big improvement over XP for partitioning to note here however.
 
uhhhh so I had it up and working... tried to partition it with partition magic (which is really not working out well for me) and then it said it had some error so I was like whatever I won't partition it. Now its not in my computer so I figured I had to format again because partition magic messed it up... but when I do that it says 'The operation was canceled due to an internal error' so now what do I do?
 
Nevermind... I got it, I had to delete the current partition to make it unallocated space (I didn't realize it wasn't already)
 
One reason for preferring GParted over other tools is the information you see about the drive and any space used right off. When some one looks in the DM on a drive where the XP installer was used for creating the one or partitions on the OS drive they wonder about the 1-8mb of unallocated drive space seen later.

It saves time figuring out error messages seen with retail softwares often. You simply use the DM after to format any new partitions you create. With that you can have any drive ready for use in minutes.
 
I went to look into gparted and there wasn't just an executeable file to download and install from or did I just miss it?
 
For Gparted it's easiest to use the livecd or usb download. Otherwise you get sourcecode and have to compile it yourself.
 
When trying out a few versions following the 0.3.3.0 version I couldn't even get those loaded with the new "start x" auto graphics configuration tool seen in those. The need for a folder on a hard drive for mounting that kept the live version from running. The last so far is the 0.3.3.0 that loads about 5 times faster then the previous cross platform releases. Once you get to the main gui it works great over other partitioning tools.

The first thing to try after burning it to a cd-r is a dry run to get familiar with it. BurnOn has a free version of their burning software that works wonders burning the 35mb iso image to disk making that bootable as well. The menu bar contains the new, resize, delete buttons as well as the apply which when used brings up the confirmation prompt. The drives and partitions on them are seen on a small tab at the right side of the menu bar with a dropdown list to choose between HDa1, HDa2, HDb1, HDb2 and so forth depending on the amount of drives and partitions found.
 
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