Installing Hard-Drive Problem (Perfectly Solved)

Cognisseur

I just bought a new hard-drive, a 1TB Hitachi.

1. So I plug it all in, turn on my computer and immediately go into BIOS. BIOS has already discovered the Hitachi and when I go into the details it tells me it has 1000GB. Good. So I leave BIOS without saving since I didn't change anything and everything rocked.

2. I enter Windows XP and discover I have no new HD visible in My Computer. I go into Device Manager and find my Hitachi is there under Disk Drives even though it isn't in My Computer. I go into Properties, Volumes, and press 'Populate' hoping this would uh... get me a hard-drive. At this point, it "populated it" by discovering that it's a 33MB hard-drive (I disagree).

3. I turn my computer off, turn it on, and go into BIOS. Now BIOS thinks it's a 33MB hard-drive too.

4. So I turn off my computer, change the SATA cable to another hub hoping to convince my computer I have a new hard-drive that's the 1000GB it initially thought it was. No luck. BIOS still thinks it's 33MB.

5. I load Windows, and surprisingly, My Computer now discovers I have a Hard-Drive. Now, oddly, it calls it a Dell instead of a Hitachi but uh, go figure. My Computer thinks it has 124MB, which is an improvement I suppose, but still a far cry from 1000GB.

6. I go into the Properties of this Dell HD and in Properties it agrees that it's a Hitachi HD. Except now we're back to square 1 because there's nothing listed under Volumes.

7. I figure I need drivers but I look it up online and apparently Windows XP comes with drivers that work just dandy with Hitachi HDs.

So uh... help. I have no idea what to do now. I have a hard-drive that BIOS used to believe was 1000GB and Windows used to believe didn't exist and now both have compromised on the agreement that it's somewhere between a 32MB-124MB HD that's either Dell or Hitachi.

Edit: I realized this may be better suited for Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern so feel free to lock or delete this thread, sorry!

Bendery It Like Beckham

Windows
has its own tool for this job - called 'Disk Management'. Unlike 'My Computer', it shows every drive connected to the system - formatted/partitioned or not. Access it by Right clicking on 'My Computer', and selecting 'Manage'. In the left-hand pane, select 'Disk Management'

Now, in the right-hand pane, you'll see your Hard Drives and Optical Drives - hopefully including the new drive which will show up as 'unallocated space'. New disks appear as Not Initialized. Microsoft state that if you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk. If for any reason it does not, you can initialize it manually. Just right-click on the new disk's 'label' (the gray box to the right of the black bar that denotes the unallocated space), and select 'Initialize'.

When done, you can begin to format the drive. Here are the instructions to create a single partition the full size of your new drive

* Right-click unallocated space on the basic disk you want to format, and then click New Partition.

* In the New Partition Wizard, click Next

* Select 'Extended partition', click Next.

* Specify the full size of the disk in the 'Partition size in MB' box and then click Next

* Click Finish

* You will now be returned to the main Disc Management screen. The new disc will now be highlighted in light green (indicating free space), and bordered in dark green (indicating an extended partition). Now, we'll create a partition within this free space. Right-click the free space, and select New Logical Drive. Click next in the wizard that appears

* Select Logical drive, click next

* This screen shows the maximum and minimum partition sizes. Specify the maximum size here for one partition that will fill the disc. Click next.

* On this screen, choose to assign a free drive letter. Click next.

* Now choose to format the partition. Choose NTFS, with the default Allocation unit size. The volume label is whatever you want the drive to be called. Don't enable file and folder compression, and I'd also recommend you don't perform a quick format on a new drive. The default full format checks the entire surface of the disc for problems. Click next, then finish, and you're done!

Now go and grab something to eat/drink, as this will take a while on a large drive.

If you want to create more than one partition on the disc, the steps are similar, apart from the size of the partition you will be creating. To create a second partition on the disc, select the remaining unallocated space and repeat the steps. You might also want to look at Microsoft's own Knowledge-base article on the subject

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

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Cognisseur

Wow. That... couldn't be any more clear, concise, and precisely what I was looking for.

Thanks.