HardwareProblems.com

A lot of people are able to determine how to install a hard drive in their Windows based PC through reading their motherboard manual, a hard drive installation manual, or have a ‘techie’ friend / neighbor do it for them. That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not just a matter of putting cable A into connector B. It’s a bit more involved, but many people, not knowing any better, often blame it on the hard drive as it fails to show up in Windows Explorer on their PC. Well without sounding any further condescending, which often seems to happen when I try to write helpful tips, let’s see if I can help out. The fact that you’ve read this far suggests that’s what you’re here for.

The steps below show an example on a Windows XP system but the steps are virtually identical in Vista and will work for Vista users as well.

Step 1: Hopefully you’ll boot into Windows and you’ll see, or already have seen, a little notification bubble on your taskbar informing you that its ‘Found New Hardware’. It’ll generally first pop up a notification bubble with the model/part number followed by a second. If it doesn’t, that’s a subject I’ll consider tackling in another tech tip in the future.

Step 2: Right-click the words ‘My Computer’ (just ‘Computer’ for Vista users) on the start menu or from the desktop. From the context menu that appears, click ‘Manage’. A ‘Computer Management’ window should open.

Step 3: Click ‘Disk Management’ from the left hand column under ‘Storage’. If you’re using Vista, you’ll be presented with the option to ‘Initialize’ a new disk. Go ahead and do so with the default settings. In the example below, you’ll see ‘Disk 1 Basic’ showing ‘74.53GB Unallocated’. This is the ‘new’ 80GB hard drive I have added to this system. For the sake of making things easy to understand, think of this ‘Unallocated’ space as a big white sheet of paper.

Step 4: Right-click anywhere within the bar with the words ‘Unallocated’. From the context menu, choose ‘New Partition’. A ‘New Partition’ Window should open.

Step 5: This is the first window you are presented with and provides you with a short explanation of what we are about to do. Just click ‘Next’

Step 6: For the sake of making things simple, just ensure that ‘Primary Partition’ is selected like the example below and click ‘Next’.

Step 7: At this step you can choose how you wish to partition the drive. In Step 3, I suggested that you think of the ‘Unallocated’ space of your hard drive as a big sheet of paper. Basically, partitioning means cutting this big sheet of paper into smaller pages. In this example I have 76317 MB available to ‘cut to smaller pages’, if I so choose. If you choose to ‘cut’ (partition) your hard drive into ‘pages’, you will need to run the ‘New Partition Wizard’ for each ‘page’ you create. For this example, I’m leaving the ‘big sheet of paper’ as is.

Step 8: Next assign a drive letter. This drive letter is the letter you see in Windows Explorer. For most people, drive ‘C’ is your main hard drive or partition and is where Windows is located. You are free to choose any letter you wish from the drop down menu.

Step 9: Formatting a partition, going back to the paper analogy, is basically putting lines on the paper so that your computer can write data to it. Unless you have chosen a partition size less than 32GB, the only ‘File System’ option you will see is ‘NTFS’. Just leave it as is. If you’re curious as to what the other options are, you’ll have to research that on your own as it won’t be discussed here. For volume label, this is where you can put in a descriptive label for the partition such as ‘Digital Pictures’. I would also strongly suggest that you select ‘Perform a quick format’ unless you have a few hours to spare and want to have Windows check your new drive for possible problems such as bad sectors.

Step 10 – A review of all the settings that you have made over the past several steps. Just click ‘Finish’.

Step 11 – If all goes well, you should see the words ‘Formatting’ where it used to say ‘Unallocated’ replaced later by the words ‘Healthy’. In my example below, you’ll see that ‘Disk 1’ is now ‘New Volume (D:) 74.53GB NTFS Healthy’. You’re done and ready to use your new hard drive.

If after reading the above steps, you’re still not quite sure of the process, click on the Youtube video below which will show you the process in action.

PS - For those of you wondering why my XP system taskbar bares a striking resemblance to the Vista taskbar, come back soon to see my tip on ‘skinning’ XP called DIY - Free Windows XP Facelift. It’s a really old trick but there’s still a lot of people using XP and staring at that boring old green and blue.