New hard drives not showing up in My Computer

[clare]

I have recently assembled a new PC. It is running Vista Ultimate SP1. I have installed the OS onto one 500GB SATA drive and have fitted two further 500GB SATA HDD. I have looked at your FAQ article regarding showing new HDD in My Computer but I cannot follow it in my options in Disk management.

I get the wizard up stating
You must initialise a disk before Logical Disk manager can access it

Select Disks:

Then there is a box which is 'ticked' next to wording Disk 2

Use the following partition style
Then an option selected as MBR and an alternative GUID Partition table.

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I will now describe what I see in the Disk Manage screen

Disk 0, basic, 465.76GB Online. Blue header C: 127.99GB NTFS / Black header 333.77GB unallocated

Disk 1, Basic, 456.76GB Online. Black header 456.76 GB unallocated

Disk 2, (RED ARROW) unknown 456.76GB not initialised. Black header 456.76GB

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I would like to make the remaining 333.77GB of Disk 0 as a data partition drive D:

And the two other HDD as Data E: and Data F: for my video editing.

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Please can someone guide me through the steps?

Clare

[glc]

1. Initialize Disk 2 with MBR, make sure it'a a basic disk (do not upgrade to dynamic).
2. Change the drive letter of your optical drive or drives to something higher than F.
3. Right click on all unallocated areas and create partitions. If you make them primary partitions, assign them desired drive letters and format them NTFS. If you make them extended partitions, you will have to create logical drives in them with the desired drive letters.

[clare]

Hi GLC,

Just picked up your reply, thank you.

Please can you expand on difference/pro's and con's of primary versus extended partitions?

Clare

[glc]

That's a topic that has been argued for many years. Bottom line, I'd recommend that you make the second partition on your boot drive an extended partition with a logical drive, and it's fine to make the other 2 drives primary. Why? No particular reason but I've never had an issue doing it this way on a single boot OS machine.

[clare]

Many thanks. Will take your advice.

Clare

[freakitchen]

A decent reason for doing it how glc suggests - if ever you have to wipe and re-install windows on that hard drive, it's possible that the second partition, if created as primary, could grab the C: drive letter, forcing you to create the boot partition as an alternative letter - less than ideal. That's certainly how it worked with XP, Vista may be different, but nevertheless, there are no downsides to an extended/logical partition/drive. It doesn't matter for data only disks, as you'd want to disconnect these for a fresh install.

[clare]

Hi

I have finally followed the advice (it has been half term from school) and managed to format the three SATA drives as Data D, E and F. I was then intending to move the 'My Documents' Target to D: like in Windows XP Pro by typing in the new path letter. However it is obviously different in Vista ;-(

please can anyone reply with the method for changing the default location for Documents to a different drive letter in Vista? I intend to leave C: for programme files

Cheers

Clare

[glc]

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1371

[clare]

Brilliant, thank you ;-)

Clare