How to reformat a drive from Windows, if it does not show in My Computer (no drive letter assigned)

[GreenGhost]

I installed a new hard drive, which was pulled from a Linux system, to use as a secondary drive. The HD shows both in the Bios setup screen AND in Windows Device Manager. However, Windows does not assign a letter to it, probably because is not formatted for Windows. How do I reformat it? Can it be done from Windows 2000?

 

[DaveSimmons]

search for Disk Manager in Help, run it, you may need to "re-scan disks" to find it.

Or use a W98SE DOS boot disk and FDISK / format. www.bootdisk.com

 

[erikistired]

in your control panel double click on 'administrative tools' and then computer management. from there click on disk management. you should have disk 0 and disk 1 (if you have 2 hdds), with disk 0 showing as C:. disk 1 will probably be unrecognized format or something, i don't have a linux formatted drive here in front of me so i'm not sure what it'll show up as. you should just be able to right click on it and format it from there, or create a partition and then format it. either way, that's where you do things of that nature in windows 2000. just don't format your boot drive.

 

[GreenGhost]

Thanks fisher. It shows up there, it's easy now. In my case I had 6 partitions. Properties showed "File system unknown." I could delete the extra partitions (they went to "Free Space" and then "Unallocated"). Formatting now