2nd hard drive not showing on PC

confused Newbie question peeps
I have just had another 500gb HD installed on my PC. Problem is I cannot see the drive. What do I need to do so that the PC recognises it. My os is XP Home
Thanks in advance for any help

 

Hi there kirky,

Who installed it and why did they not get it running for you? Is it under guarantee from a shop?

To enable us to help please post the following information.

Is the new drive internal or external
Is it SATA, or IDE
Is your Windows XP up to service pack 2?
Are you able to access the BIOS and what is its date.

If you need help with any of these questions, ask and we will gladly explain further.

Studio T

 

Had the PC abous a year and needed more storage so I got thid drive fitted today at my local shop. They did say I would need to partition it, but Im not sure how to do that.

Its an internal SATA on Windows XP SP2
thanks

 

Sounds like your hard drive is not initialized.

Try this:

goto START MENU
CONTROL PANEL
ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS
COMPUTER MANAGEMENT
On the left hand side of the screen click on DISK MANAGEMENT. The hard drive should show up there. It probably says it's not initialized. Right click on the drive and choose to initialize it, then partition it.

I hope you can follow my directions. I'm not very good at giving directions. I hope this fixes your problem. I think it should. When I was a computer tech this happened all the time to customers buying and installing new hard drives.

 

Since your pc is only 1 year old (happy birthday?) and you have SP2 it should have no problem recognising the 500GB drive.
However, you may need to set the bios to use SATA, if you do not already have SATA installed. If one of your existing drives is already SATA, there is nothing more for you to do in BIOS, just follow buffalo bills advice and partition and format the drive. You will need to do both before it will show up in explorer/mycomputer.

If you need more dertailed advice on this ask again.


Studio T

 

Nice one guys. Disc is now formating. Thank you very much for your help

 

Good to hear your problem is solved. It'll take awhile to format a 500 gig drive.

 

8% only. But the wait will be worth it.

 

Time for a pint then.

studio T