Windows 7 - hard drive

Hi,

I have just bought a new Dell and installed a 2nd hard drive...i say me it was my mate really Anyway the bios can see it but the os cant (win 7) I assume it needs formatting but dont know how also i dont want to mess up the current hd which is running the os. Any help or adivce would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Adam

Hello Adam,

Right click Computer and select Manage, then Disk Management, now you should see your new drive. Right click it and activate the drive, set the partition and format it as the NTFS.

Hope it helps.

ah i see, brillliant. Just 1 quesiton on doing so i get this message

"you must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it" there a tick box wiht DISK 1 checked under which is MBR - master boot record or GPT (MBR is checked) do i just tick ok or cancel?

thank you in advance

Ad

In Disk Manager, You have to right click on the left box of this drive (where it says Disk 0, Disk 1, etc). There you can initialize it.

ukadam,
do not activate the partition. MS assumes that the "activated" partition is the one to boot from. Using DiskManager, format the drive.

You might not be pleased with the drive letter that Windows assigned to your harddrive.

Personally, I use diskmanagement to assign the letter M to my DVD drive to "get it out of the way". Then remove any usb sticks or drives, and using DiskManagement change the drive letter for your second drive to the letter you desire.

Oh yes, I don't have a second hard drive handy but quite often using DiskPart you can mark a partition on your second drive as active without any problems.

Other tricks to play if this is a desktop is to simply disconnect your main drive and then using your Windows 7 DVD, shift+F10 to get to a command prompt and then using diskpart to set up that second drive. AFter that is finished, and with power off, reconnect your main drive. Now when Windows 7 boots up there will be no complaints.

cheers guys really appreciate the advice