Help! I can't 'see' my new hard drive

[SMOKEU]

I bought a 2TB WD HD today, and it doesn't show up in 'My Computer' in Windows 7. I have checked the device manager and the drive shows up in there as working normally. I have unchecked the 'hide empty drives' option in the folder options, but that hasn't made any difference.
I went into the Control Panel/Administrative tools/Computer management/disk management and my new drive doesn't show up in there.
It does show up as a drive in the BIOS.

[neels]

Do you still have to fdisk and format hard drives these days for them to appear in windows?

[Latte]

Right Click > Properties on the drive in Device Manager, go to the Volume tab and press populate, screenshot the results.

[Rockbuddy]

Easy get rid of the lot and buy a MAC

[cs363]

Have you run the installation software from WD? Go here and select your hard drive model and follow the prompts: http://support.wdc.com/product/install.asp?wdc_lang=en

There are other ways around it, but the manufacturers software is usually the easiest unless you're an advanced user. This will show you the correct installation steps and how to format so that Windows can 'see' the drive.

[Jacko2]

Easy get rid of the lot and buy a MAC

Your a sMAC

[SMOKEU]

Right Click > Properties on the drive in Device Manager, go to the Volume tab and press populate, screenshot the results.

Here it is.

216659

[p.dath]

Right click on "My Computer" and select manage. Go to disk management. You should see the new disk there.

Right click on it to initialize the disk, and then again to create a partition, and then format it.

[SMOKEU]

Have you run the installation software from WD? Go here and select your hard drive model and follow the prompts: http://support.wdc.com/product/install.asp?wdc_lang=en

There are other ways around it, but the manufacturers software is usually the easiest unless you're an advanced user. This will show you the correct installation steps and how to format so that Windows can 'see' the drive.

I'll give that a go.


Right click on "My Computer" and select manage. Go to disk management. You should see the new disk there.

Right click on it to initialize the disk, and then again to create a partition, and then format it.

My new drive doesn't show up on there. Every other drive does show up, however.

[YellowDog]

Right click on "My Computer" and select manage. Go to disk management. You should see the new disk there.

Right click on it to initialize the disk, and then again to create a partition, and then format it.

Yep, that's the one!

Remember to assign a friendly drive letter and format it using NTFS.

[Latte]

You probably won't see the drive in the top part of the disk management window, but in the lower part will be "disk 2", but with no blue/purple bars to the right.

Right click on the "Disk 2" and do new volume/initialize as per P.Dath's post.

Have attached a screeny to show where I mean.

[SMOKEU]

Do I want to create a striped volume or a spanned volume? Is there any significant advantage of formatting it in NTFS instead of FAT32, because I'm also going to be using Linux which I understand is not NTFS compatible. However, this drive is simply a backup drive, so all my music/movies will be stored on the external FAT32 drive, so I don't really need this drive to be Linux compatible.

[cs363]

Depends what you want to do and how you want to do it :)

Here's a couple of links that may help: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=968169
https://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/russel_october01.mspx

[Latte]

Simple, and NTFS (I beleive fat32 has a 2g/4g file size limit which is bad for storing your legal backups of HD movies and Linux Iso's).

Linux can use NTFS fine :D The data drives in my server are all ntfs (incase I got back to the dark side)

[SMOKEU]

Thanks for your help everyone, I've gotten the drive to format at the moment with NTFS.

[p.dath]

I'll give that a go.



My new drive doesn't show up on there. Every other drive does show up, however.

It your new disk does not show up under disk management then it is not plugged in correctly. Check the drive has power (can you hear it running) and that the interface cable is correctly plugged in.

[p.dath]

Do I want to create a striped volume or a spanned volume? Is there any significant advantage of formatting it in NTFS instead of FAT32, because I'm also going to be using Linux which I understand is not NTFS compatible. However, this drive is simply a backup drive, so all my music/movies will be stored on the external FAT32 drive, so I don't really need this drive to be Linux compatible.

If you want to use it with Linux do not stripe or span it. This combines your two disks into one. Keep the two disks seperate as two different drive letters.

[SMOKEU]

I've just completed formatting the drive and it's all good now. Thanks everyone!

[SMOKEU]

While we're on the topic of hard drives, I've got a 12" sub sitting about half a metre away from my computer. Are the vibrations from the sub going to damage the drives? (keeping in mind I have about 350WRMS going into the sub)

[YellowDog]

Thanks for your help everyone, I've gotten the drive to format at the moment with NTFS.

Sounds sweet to me.

Just to be safe, why don't you run a thorough scandisk on it so that any bad sectors are marked as not to be written on.

Properties of Drive/Tools tab/Check now/Tick both boxes/Start

If it asks you to schedule it for the next startup due to exclusive access being required, say yes and then restart when you have a couple of spare hours.

[Lurch]

While we're on the topic of hard drives, I've got a 12" sub sitting about half a metre away from my computer. Are the vibrations from the sub going to damage the drives? (keeping in mind I have about 350WRMS going into the sub)

High amplitude sound has proven to interfere with hard disk performance before, I wouldn't recommend exposing your PC to high levels of direct bass for extended periods.

[SMOKEU]

High amplitude sound has proven to interfere with hard disk performance before, I wouldn't recommend exposing your PC to high levels of direct bass for extended periods.

I've always been told not to move a hard drive while it's switched on, but HDD based MP3 players don't seem to be affected too much by constant shocks.

[YellowDog]

I've always been told not to move a hard drive while it's switched on, but HDD based MP3 players don't seem to be affected too much by constant shocks.

Music's quite easy 'cos it's sequential access so you can have a huge buffer without anyone really noticing the poor performance.

Most use solid state chips now that the high capacity SD is readily available.

[Gremlin]

I've always been told not to move a hard drive while it's switched on, but HDD based MP3 players don't seem to be affected too much by constant shocks.
MP3 players using memory chips have very different hardware, including the lack of platters and heads.

Easy way to see the difference. Try getting decent write speeds on USB pen drives.

[p.dath]

While we're on the topic of hard drives, I've got a 12" sub sitting about half a metre away from my computer. Are the vibrations from the sub going to damage the drives? (keeping in mind I have about 350WRMS going into the sub)

See if you can find the 'G' rating for your hard drive. Most have some kind of specification relating to shocks. Ideally look for something specifying the shock in terms of energy (such as joules).

Next find a calculator to work out how much energy your sub is putting out.

My personal guess is the pressure waves created by a sub would not be sufficient to interfere with a hard drive. You can barely feel the pressure wave of a sub on your skin (so it's probably something like .0001G or something redicously small). I bet you can feel greater pressure (with your finger touching it) from the hard drive itself when it is seeking.

And althought you have 350WRMS of sub, chances are you wont actually be driving it that hard most of the time or you will suffer hearing damage.

[Lurch]

See if you can find the 'G' rating for your hard drive. Most have some kind of specification relating to shocks. Ideally look for something specifying the shock in terms of energy (such as joules).

Next find a calculator to work out how much energy your sub is putting out.

My personal guess is the pressure waves created by a sub would not be sufficient to interfere with a hard drive. You can barely feel the pressure wave of a sub on your skin (so it's probably something like .0001G or something redicously small). I bet you can feel greater pressure (with your finger touching it) from the hard drive itself when it is seeking.

And althought you have 350WRMS of sub, chances are you wont actually be driving it that hard most of the time or you will suffer hearing damage.

There is a video of a guy on the interwebs yelling at an enterprise level drive array and the monitoring system recording a disk performance drop. ie. the energy of his unamplified voice was enough to interfere with the disk read/write heads.

[Lurch]

Here's the vid:
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[Suntoucher]

Vibrations + HDD's = Reduced lifespan and a greater number of errors, which you will see as slower read rates(it has to read that sector again as it spins around the second time).

Mechanical drives have lots of delicate moving parts moving at up to 7200rpm, you won't destroy it(aside from the reduced lifespan, not greatly reduced but no one wants to eventually lose their data).

It won't physically damage your disks but HDD's are already the bottleneck in modern computers, why make it even slower?

Big speakers also have big magnets, electronics don't like magnets.

[Scouse]

While we're on the topic of hard drives, I've got a 12" sub sitting about half a metre away from my computer. Are the vibrations from the sub going to damage the drives? (keeping in mind I have about 350WRMS going into the sub)Is that the new 12" sub with grilled meatballs and cheese? yum

[SMOKEU]

Is that the new 12" sub with grilled meatballs and cheese? yum

It could be.

[jonbuoy]

Easy get rid of the lot and buy a MAC

Yeah MACs are great at READING USB drives, shame they can´t WRITE to an NTFS formatted drive (even LINUX can) without hackings and work arounds.

[Suntoucher]

God forbid you pull one of these USB drives out without ejecting it like everyone does. It'll corrupt it quicker than you can so, "NO, YOU GOD DAMN PIECE OF SHIT MAC. Stop eying up fresh livers and fix it, Jobs!"

Pretty much the only reason why Steve Jobs is targeting the youth market, the young, unadulterated organs.