Vista not seeing new Hard drive

Darryl_1983 · 23 Jan 2008 at 08:53

Last night i put a new MB, CPU, HSF, RAM and another 500GB Hard drive into my pc. Had a little bit of trouble but managed to sort it all out. Except the hard drive doesn't show up in vista for some reason.

I've got vista installed on my original drive, which works fine. both drives are 'Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA-II (WD5000AAKS)'. And they both show up in the bios.

Fire Wizard · 23 Jan 2008 at 09:06

Hello Darryl_1983, the reason why you probably can't see your second hard disk in Windows is because you haven't yet partitioned the disk.

To do this simply type in "Computer Management" into Vista's start menu search bar and hit enter. Once the computer management window has appeared navigate down to where it says Disk Management which is located under the Storage option. Now in the bottom half of that page you should see two disks, Disk 0 (Your drive that has your Windows Installation on) and Disk 1 (Which is empty and should say Unallocated [This is your missing Hard Disk Drive])

Now right click on the black bar and select New Simple Volume. The New Simple Volume Wizard should now pop up, once it does just simply follow the very easy to follow on screen instructions. Once you have completed this process you will then be able to use your second hard disk drive.

Just to clarify, this is not a Windows Vista problem.

Darryl_1983 · 23 Jan 2008 at 09:14

Cool, thanks for that Fire Wizard, i'll give that a go when i get home after work. I've never had 2 internal drives in the same pc before. And windows as always just picked up the one drive automatically. Seems strange that it doesn't do it for more than one drive.