HDD : New HDD, Recognized in Device Manager, not in My Computer

[PolakTom101]

Hello Neowin Community,

I recently bought a new hard drive as a second drive for storage and I installed it inside my computer. Now while the hard drive is being recognized in Device Manager, it is not showing up in My Computer.

Any Ideas what the problem could be?

Thanks

P.S. I'm running Windows 7 Pro, 64-Bit

[Max Norris]

Does it have an active partition? Might need to create one.

[sc302 Veteran]

disk management.

give it a different drive letter or format the drive.

[Open Minded]

You need to go into control panel, Administrative Tools , computer management, disk management (under storage), and make the partition active. It should ask you right when you open disk management if you want to setup the drive. After it's active all you need to do is format and you should be good to go.

[Roger H. Veteran]

I dunno why but lots of drives are coming like this lately. The above is usually the solution.

[Daedroth]

  On 31/10/2011 at 16:04, SHoTTa35 said:

I dunno why but lots of drives are coming like this lately. The above is usually the solution.

Probably so they are compatible with all systems, not specific operating systems. Imagine if they came with a ext3 partition as standard.

[Detection]

  On 31/10/2011 at 16:04, SHoTTa35 said:

I dunno why but lots of drives are coming like this lately. The above is usually the solution.

Probably to save time and money formatting during manufacturer

[+LogicalApex MVC]

  On 31/10/2011 at 16:04, SHoTTa35 said:

I dunno why but lots of drives are coming like this lately. The above is usually the solution.

I don't buy "retail" drives, but my theory has been they made this change to push the retail drives on users with less technical knowledge. As they will buy the OEM drives and go "they don't work" and end up ponying up money for the shorter warranty and higher price of the retail variant.

Since I haven't purchased a retail drive to see if they come pre-formatted this is just a theory on my part.

[morphen]

uh, i've never bought a harddrive that was pre-initialized, except external drives.

(preformatted,pre-partitioned or whatever)

[cybertimber2008]

Did you buy chance buy a OEM drive? I've seen quite a few OEM drives arrive un-initialized.

[PolakTom101]

Yes it was a OEM drive. In the past when I bought them it would be for a new build so I could just format all of them inside the Windows setup when I would load Windows onto the computer.

[Allan]

  On 31/10/2011 at 16:01, Open Minded said:

You need to go into control panel, Administrative Tools , computer management, disk management (under storage), and make the partition active. It should ask you right when you open disk management if you want to setup the drive. After it's active all you need to do is format and you should be good to go.

there's a faster way to get to disk management - (on desktop) Right click Computer > Click Manage > Click Disk Management

Faster than that: Click start type Computer Management than press enter.

[+BudMan MVC]

"and make the partition active."

No you do not need to mark the partition active..

Create a partition, and then format it sure. The active partition is the partition that will boot.. You would not want to do this on secondary drive your installing.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/228004

Changing Active Partition Can Make Your System Unbootable

I don't recall the last time I bought a retail disk, but I find it HIGHLY unlikely they would come pre anything. Unless like stated it was an external disk.

If I buy a new disk, it should be BLANK - no partitions, no filesystems (formatted). If it came with a partition on it, I would have to assume it was not not new! ;)

So as stated go to disk management and then create the partitions on it you want, and then format them -- then either give it a drive letter or mount it to a folder.