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

  1. #1
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    Help! I can't 'see' my new hard drive

    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.

  2. #2
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    Do you still have to fdisk and format hard drives these days for them to appear in windows?
    Riding cheap crappy old bikes badly since 1987

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

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    Easy get rid of the lot and buy a MAC
    I cannot put my finger on it now, the child has grown the dream has gone

    there'll be no more aaarrrrrggghhhhh but you may feel a little sick

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    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.

    Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that, who cares? ...He's a mile away and you've got his shoes

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    Red face

    Quote Originally Posted by Rockbuddy View Post
    Easy get rid of the lot and buy a MAC
    Your a sMAC

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    Quote Originally Posted by hiss View Post
    Right Click > Properties on the drive in Device Manager, go to the Volume tab and press populate, screenshot the results.
    Here it is.

    Click image for larger version. 

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  8. #8
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    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by cs363 View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by p.dath View Post
    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.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by p.dath View Post
    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.

  11. #11
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    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.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Click image for larger version. 

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    Ciao Marco

  12. #12
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    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.

  13. #13
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    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/...october01.mspx

    Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that, who cares? ...He's a mile away and you've got his shoes

  14. #14
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    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 The data drives in my server are all ntfs (incase I got back to the dark side)
    Ciao Marco

  15. #15
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    Thanks for your help everyone, I've gotten the drive to format at the moment with NTFS.

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