DISK MANAGEMENT
When you install a new slave drive or have trouble accessing your hard drive, disk management should be the first place you check to verify the structure of the drive or partition & reformat a new drive.
When you install a new hard drive out of the box, it
will not show up under "MY Computer" until it has been partitioned and formatted.
When installing any hard drive the first steps to verification are:
A) does the new drive appear in the bios & is the drive manufacturer & size reported correctly?
B) Access disk management and partition the drive for the configuration your desire. Format the Drive as
NTFS Do not use the Fat32 file system unless you want to be limited to 32gig partition ?????? There are ways to circumvent this limit but not with Disk Managment and Win XP. Should you need a partition larger than 32gig & Fat32 file system; please ask for assistance in the "Hard Drive Section"
The Journey:
Go to
Start then slide to the right and right click on "my computer"
this will bring up a menu like this:
from that menu select "manage" this action will result in the appearance of a console like this:
then you select "disk managment' from the left pane of the console above.
In the
right pane you will see all drives which have been recognized by your system bios, like this
In the lower section of the right pane you will see all the hard drives assigned a designation:
this system has:
Disk 0 Western Digital IDE hard drive with four partitions (see the four boxes to the right of the Disk O designation)
Disk 1 U-320 Drive has one Partition
Disk 2 2 Partitions
Disk 3 2 partitions I have selected a partition by clicking one left mouse click on a partition, note how the partition is shown by cross hatched diagonal lines, this designates you have selected this partition for modification. I have right clicked on the selected partition to bring up the "disk mangement tools" from there you can Partition, Format, Delete a Partition, Set a partition as active etc.
This particular example doesnt show the "make" a partition because my drive already has them, if the drive did not have a partition, then the create partition option would be in the menu.
Note on my
Disk 3 there is a blue bubble that says "system" this is a designation to show the boot drive partition.
You should also note that each partition box shows the file system which the partition has been assigned. Mine are all NTFS.
If you have any questions or need further help, please start a new thread request in the "Hard Drive" section.
addendum: Each hard drive manufacturer has programs with "tools" for partitioning & formatting. You can also use those tools for your partition work, there are advantages for using those, especially if you are using Win XP home edition.
The draw back to partitioning a slave drive from within disk management, being; the salve drive's geometry (set up parameters) is written to your boot drive, becasue you are "in" the windows OS.
If you remove the boot drive or clean install your OS to your boot drive you may lose access to your slave drive. This problem can occur becasue the new fresh install can not "work" with the drive becasue it has no partition information to "work" with.
This can be avoided by using the manufacturers set-up software to partition your drives or use a third party application like Partition Magic, Boot It NG, Ranish Partition Manager (free)
When you use a third party application like that; then your partition set-up paramters are written to the actual slave drive like this: