Installing SATA drives: How to...

[beavereater]

It took me ages to find an article that helped me get my new 1.5 TB drive working, and this is it. Hope it falls into the hands of some others in need.

As digital media becomes more and more popular, our computers are needing more and more hard drive space. With the price of, frankly, huge capacity hard drives continuously hitting new lows, it's now not just computer enthusiasts who are adding new drives to their new computers.

While it's relatively easy, particularly with SATA hard drives, to add a new drive - it's not immediately obvious to everyone how to start using a new drive. You have the hard drive connected correctly, it's recognized in the system BIOS, but it's missing from 'My Computer'.

Well, that's because it's not formatted. The word 'partition' is usually associated with one physical drive being split into more than one logical drive - but actually, EVERY hard drive needs a partition - even if it's the full size of the disc.

Thankfully, 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

[hech54]

Been There - Done That....I just always forget two things....the name "Disc Management" and where to find it exactly.

[UnderSpaced]

This would have been helpful to me as I just installed a new SATA drive last Friday. I didn't know about disc management so I just formatted my drive with my Windows XP CD I bought.

Your method would have been easier for me.