New Hard drive not visible

sparky05084 · 19 Sep 2011 at 19:04

Hey all.

I'm in need of some help. Ok, so I have installed a secondary hard drive. It's a Western Digital 1TB drive. Powered it up and connected the Sata cable. No problems booting into windows.

I am currently running XP SP3 32 bit and I have a nice new copy of Win 7 Home Premium Edition and I aim to put it on the new drive.

The drive is visible in device manager and says it is working properly and there are no conflicts or issues. However, it is not visible in explorer when I click my computer where all your drives are listed. Now, I believe that you have to do the below to get it to be active. Please study it.

Now, going into My Computer > Manage > Computer Management > Disk Management I can clearly see that my new drive is there and I have initialized it.

Now it asks me to create a new partition. Not a problem. I click Primary Partition > Maximum Partition size MB > Assign the drive letter (pick J as it is the next one available)....then I am stuck at this bit:

Mount in the following empty NTFS folder: (blank space with browse option)

I click Browse and it comes up with the following:

C:\ (Win XP drive with expansion option)
I\: (Western Digital External hard drive also with expanison option)

My question is what do I do here and where do I allocate this drive? I have assigned it a letteer which is obviously J but the next bit throws me. Do I creat a new folder and call it J?

I have no idea. Please advise.

Thanks all.

mp260767 · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:11

sounds like you took a wrong option when creating the partition , have you tried deleting it and recreating it ?

Hyburnate · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:13

Is it appearing in bios?

Hagar · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:29

You need to create a new primary partition (may be called a simple partition). If windows will not do this, download and use gparted on a bootable CD.

andy.

sparky05084 · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:55

Hey guys thanks for replies. Ok I have managed to restart the process and my drive has been formatted.

I do have a few questions though and would again appreciate some help. Currently my primary boot drive is Windows C:\ which has XP on it.

I am going to put Windows 7 on the newly installed drive that is now labelled J:\

I imagine that when I boot up before putting windows 7 on it will just go straight into XP as normal and in explorer I would now see that J drive as a storage device. I think I'm correct so far.

This is what I want for now whilst I use XP to back up all my stuff to external drive but eventually when I have loaded Win 7 disc via boot from device in BIOS I will install it and then I will have 2 operating systems on comp.

So, how would I then set up so that comp boots the J drive firstly instead of me being asked to select which OS to choose?

Am I right in saying that if I re open up case and simply swap Sata cables on Mobo that the Hdd's would change so that Win 7 drive would now be assigned disk 0 and Win XP disk 1?

Is that incorrect or could that cause a major bugger up? Or is there an easier way?

Remember that for now I will use XP to back up data, then I would wipe that drive and have it as storage and the J drive would be primary.

Thanks again fellas.

Orcvader · 19 Sep 2011 at 21:17

How about to make your life easier, move everything to the drive with XP in, take out the XP drive, then install Win 7 on the new drive, then connect the XP drive back and move all your personal files to the 7 drive, then format the entire XP drive?

In BIOS you decide which drive it boots from. Just select the drive 7 is on. You could've also used the install disc to format the drive.

d_brennen · 19 Sep 2011 at 21:23

Orcvader said:
How about to make your life easier, move everything to the drive with XP in, take out the XP drive, then install Win 7 on the new drive, then connect the XP drive back and move all your personal files to the 7 drive, then format the entire XP drive?

This. K.I.S.S.

sparky05084 · 19 Sep 2011 at 22:06

Yes that sounds like a plan.

Uh oh, I see I didn't realise that Win 7 install would format it for me. It doesn't make any difference though does it that I've formatted the new hard drive in XP using the Disk Management wizard?

Orcvader · 19 Sep 2011 at 22:08

No idea. I always installed on an unformatted drive. But the install disc also allows you to delete any existing partitions. I would let Win 7 delete the XP formatted partition and create a new one. It litterally only takes a few seconds to do this.

EDIT: Make sure you have only the optical drive and the drive you're going to install 7 on plugged it. That way the boot files won't go to other drives that could cause problems for your system.

Hagar · 20 Sep 2011 at 09:12

sparky05084 said:
Yes that sounds like a plan.

Uh oh, I see I didn't realise that Win 7 install would format it for me. It doesn't make any difference though does it that I've formatted the new hard drive in XP using the Disk Management wizard?

When installing win7 to a formatted drive, I always delete the existing partition then let win7 format the drive which it will do creating a 100mb system and a main (c:/) partition. This leads to a trouble free installation.
As previously said only connect the one hard disk and the DVD when installing.