My second hard drive won't work...

[Maxpane]

I am running a W.D. 20 gig hard drive and just bought an aditional 120 gig W.D. drive. They are bothe 7200 rpm ide drives. My question is, do I need to install an operating system in the second drive in order for it to work. I have them bothe connected to the same ribbon and windows lists the new drive in device manager and claims that it it working properly, but their is no letter assigned to it. When I click on volume for that drive it doesn't list anything.

 

[Wolfsraider]

it needs to be formatted.

then you can use it.

 

[Maxpane]

How do I format it if it doesn't have a drive letter to click on?

 

[nightowl]

If you are using Win2k or XP right click on My Computer and select Manage. In the window that opens select Disk Management on the left side. This will load the disk managment control panel on the right side. The control panel shows all drives that are connected to the system and functioning correctly. From here you can click on your drive (it should be listed as unallocated space) and format it. If you are indeed using Win2k or XP I would reccomend formatting it in NTFS over FAT32 (FAT32 is limited to 32GB in XP). Also, NTFS is a more robust filesystem than FAT32. After formatting it you will be ready to go.

 

[Maxpane]

Thanx for the help nightowl!