help needed: adding new HD w/o OS software

I'm trying to add an additional hard drive to my computer but I don't have an XP disk.

Can I create one off of my other hard drive? If so, how?

HD is in and the bios are set...i just need the OS on the new drive but haven't a clue as to how to get it there.

Steve

 

hmm, are you simply adding an 'additional' hard drive like you said? or are you trying to create a new bootable drive that will run your operating system? (assumingly WindowsXP)

if its just an additional drive, you are done already, short of formatting the new drive. Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and go to Manage.

on the left side menu of the Computer Management screen that pops up, go to Disk Management (under storage). Now you have a list on the right of all the hard drives installed. The new one should say Unallocated Space. Right click it, and format it with NTFS if you are using XP. then it will appear in My Computer (after it formats)

 

Thanks for your help. My cousin came over one day and installed this HD and he didn't format the thing correctly. It's an 80 gig HD (been sitting here for years) and it was only showing 1.96 gigs total. So it was missing 78 gigs worth of space. I did as you instructed and the HD now has a capacity of 72.5 gigs but there is the other partition of 1.96 gigs. Still not all 80 but I'll take it.

 

if both of those partitions are on the same disk, you are able to expand the first partition to the entire disk size, or at least make it larger, though I am not aware of any program that does that for free.

as for the difference in hard drive size, nothing is missing. Hard drive manufacturers report the size incorrectly-- the best guess is that its just a marketing scheme since bigger numbers sound better.

when you buy an 80GB hard drive, its not a true 80GB. In reality, there are 1024 bits in a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes in a Megabyte, and 1024 Megabytes in a Gigabyte. Hard drive manufacturers report the size as 1000bytes = 1KB, 1000KB=1MB, and 1000MB=1GB

by correcting the conversion error, the true size of an 80GB hard drive should be around 74.5GB or so

 

What brand HDD is this?
You can use a free Utility from the HDD manufacture to format & partition your HDD, can make one big parttition or multiple.
If you have any important data on the 1.96 gig you'll have to backit up, cause reformating will cause data loss.