How to add a second hard drive for storage
So you've added another hard drive to your system... its detected correctly in BIOS, and when you boot into Windows its listed in Device Manager, but it is not visible in My Computer and you can't save anything to it because Windows doesn't see it?Well, if its not partitioned and formatted in a format that Windows recognises, then of course it won't!
Its very easy to do, and as this gets asked so many times, here's a brief step by step guide. (The screenshots are shown from Windows 7, but will appear identical in Windows Vista, and very similar in Windows XP with some different wording)
First of all, right-click Computer in your Start Menu or desktop (My Computer in Windows XP), and in the pop-out menu, select Manage.
This will open up the Computer Management console. In the left-hand pane, under Storage, click on Disk Management (Drive Management in Windows XP). This will then bring up a list of all storage drives connected to your computer, and in the lower half you can visibly see what partitions are on each drive.
Your new drive will be shown here, but it will show as 'Unallocated' (RAW in Windows XP).
Right-click anywhere in the Unallocated space, and in the pop-out menu, select New Volume ('Create partition' in Windows XP). This will open a wizard to help you create and format a partition.
First of all, you can select how big your partition is, if you want to make more than one. By default, it will select the size of the whole drive.
Next you can assign a drive letter. Remember, if you don't assign a drive letter, then the partition will be hidden from Windows.
Next, is where you format your partition. Best leave it at the default setting of NTFS. You can also name your new partition here if you like. A quick format usually suffices, so leave that box ticked.
Click Finish in the next screen, and your partition will be created and formatted.
And your new drive is ready to be used in Windows!
