Hard Drive problems... kinda?Follow

I bought a new hard drive cos I ran out of space on the old one. I installed as a slave to my old drive and everything was fine, except for the fact that it doesn't show up in "my computer"

It shows up in the device manager, and shows up in the disk manager in the control panel, and the device manager tells me its working fine (and I suppose it is) the only problem is that I can't see the thing, meaning I can't format it.

Would already having a D: partition be affecting this? The new drive would be recognized as D: I guess if I had never partitioned my C: when I first got the computer. The next thing I was going to try was creating a partition on the new drive that takes up all of the space on it, labeling it G: and formatting the partition. While I think that this solution will work, I would still really like to know why my computer doesn't automatically recognize my drive.

I would try deleting the old D: partition, but I'm not sure whether or not that will delete everything on the C: partition at the same time, and I'm not really wanting to take the risk.

Thanks

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Considered that the drive might just be dead, I"m going to create the G: partition and check in a minute

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Oh yeah, the drive shows up in the bios

Edited, Mar 18th 2009 2:20pm by Pensive

Yeah, right click my computer, manage, disk management, find unformatted drive at bottom, create partition of entire disk, name partition and it showed up. I then copied all of my personal files to new drive (leaving only the OS and program files on C:) and deleted the old D: partition, then renamed new disc as D:

Of course... I'm not sure what to do with the unformatted 10 gigs of space on my old C: I'd just reinstall windows or something but I lost the discs during a move.

I also took the old G: back to my mothers computer and it turns out her bios had had all but her primary sata HDD turned off, so she ended up getting another 10 gigs out of the deal, was kinda nice

Is it normal for new drives just to not show up before they are formatted or something? After my last thread I learned about master and slave configurations so it was a snap to make the new hdd into a slave, but i'm more concerned that it's unusual rather than the minor headache it took to fix.

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You know... the only thing I haven't really upgraded on this thing by now is the graphics card. I wonder if pci has anything even decent still.

Edited, Mar 18th 2009 10:40pm by Pensive

That's good to know in case I need to do it again. I thought it would just pop up at first.