Cant see my new extra hard drives?

Question

i have 1 hard drive with windows already installed, and i just added 2 extra hard drives, which are the same, so i can store movies, music,documents,etc on them. But i dont see it under my computer.When i go to device manager, it shows both drives, how do i see, or use these drives?

Answer 1

To use a new hard drive, you essentially have to do two things in order....first, fdisk it then format it. This was usually done at DOS level with system boot disk.
From Windows XP onwards, the system will pickup your drive in Device Manager, but then you need to go to Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, then Computer Management, then Disk Management. Right-click on the desired disk you want activated, then choose an option from the menu that appears. You will need to then format that disk ready for the system to make it usable for you. After that, you will see it showing in My Computer along with your existing drive. Repeat for more drives.
I hope this helps you.

Answer 2

The drives must be jumpered according to their locaiton on the cables.

Each cable has room for drives. (If you're using IDE, with SATA, you may have only one connector for each drive.)

Jumper the drive according to it's connector: Master or Slave. Since you're adding two, keep in mind that the main drive will be a Master and the CD Rom may also be jumpered as a m aster, so both new drives will be jumpered as 'Slave'.

Next, when the machine boots up, get into the Bios. (Press DEL, or F10 or poss F2 when the boot screen appears.)

Make sure that the bios is set for AUTO on each of the drives (for the CD Rom it may already be set for that specific type). Be sure to save your settings when you exit.

Now, if you cannot still see the drives, you may need to partition and format them. This can be done with any number of utilities. Open Disk Management and check for the Drives.
Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management.

In the Computer Management window, look for the Disk Manager. There you can see each drive, how it is formated or partitioned. Set a drive letter if they appear and use Windows to format. them.
Reboot.
Should be good to go.

Answer 3

Hi ghev b,

Try going back into Computer Management and go to Disc Management, you should see your drive there in the list at top AND on the bottom.

Right click the part on the far right and choose FORMAT.
Then after that is done, you need to assign a drive letter.
Again, right click >change drive letter and then choose from the list.

Should be good to go now.
Hope this helps

Answer 4

Pop open the case and disconnect your drives (turn the pc off first!) make sure the jumpers on the two new are set to "slave", and the original is set to master. There should be a diagram on the hard disk of the jumper layout, or you can look for one on google (see below)

Answer 5

If Device Manager can see the drives, then apparently they're connected. For Windows to admit they're there, you'll have to format them.

Answer 6

When you turn on your computer does it display the new drives on the BIOS screen?

You may need to press Delete, F2 or F8 when your computer starts and tell the BIOS you've added these drives.

If they are recognised then you may need to partition these drives using FDISK. I suggest you post a new question about using FDISK if you need to because it can be very harmful if used incorrectly.

Answer 7

sounds like you have to fomat the drive or you need to assign a drive letter to it. right click my computer than select manage under there it is disk management right click you extra drive and select format or change drive letter.l

Answer 8

these new hard drives need partitioned and formatted before your windows will see them in my computer