So... uh, somebody give me a bit of hard drive advice here...

[AntiAsh Superstar]

Basically can anyone give me some instructions as to how to get a PC to recognise a new hard drive? I got it all plugged in properly but I know I need to do the whole partition/format thing for it to work so... um, plz some nice person talk me through this process? I got Win XP with the security pack if that helps any (Think I heard somewhere the process is a little different for XP). Anyways... uh, advice plz? ^^;;

[Sceptile_Master]

Well if you have it connected along with your other hard drive then you could use partition magic for it. But... well, add me on MSN I'll talk you through it. But the jist of it is usally to boot from CD (the win xp CD) then use the built in partitioning.

[andyizcool]

If you plugged it in properly it should just appear in "My Computer" as a new Drive that wasn't there before. Unless Windows XP doesn't recognise it and needs the Drivers like Windows XP does for some Serial ATA Hard Drives.

[Jeff]

Is this an external drive? If so, I know WinXP should recognize it right away and you don't need to do any partitioning or formatting.