Hard Drive Help Pages

3. I have just installed a new hard drive into my system. It shows in the BIOS but windows doesn't show it at all what should I do?

When new hard drives are shipped then they come without being formatted at all. In order for windows to see them they need to have 2 preparation stages done to them.

The first is a program called FDISK. It is best used after booting to dos with a floppy. The program is stored in C:\Windows\Command. If you copy the file to a floppy and run it from the floppy (type FDISK at the A> prompt)then you will find that depending on which version you have it will first ask the question "enable large disk support". This is to support hard drives larger than 2 GB as a single drive. Assuming your drive to be larger than 2GB then you should choose Y for yes. This brings up the main screen with either 4 or 5 menu options on it. If you only have one hard drive you will get the 4 options as option 5 is to change the current fixed disk. Before proceeding make sure that you have the correct drive selected (option 4 will display information on the current drive and if it is a new drive then selecting this option will show "no partitions defined"). Choose option 1 to "Create partition or logical dos drive". Next menu will appear and option 1 is the choice to "Create primary dos partition". When asked if you want to use the full size and make the partition active you should choose yes. FDISK will then partition the drive and you will need to exit and reboot for changes to take effect.

Once rebooted you will need to format the drive to use it which can be done either under dos (boot to dos and use the format command in the form FORMAT D: - make sure you choose the correct drive to format otherwise you will lose all data on that drive.) or under windows (double click My Computer, right click on the new drive and choose Format from the popup menu). The windows option is both quicker and safer since if you have more than one drive and you choose the wrong drive letter in the format command you will lose all your existing data.