Partition A New Hard Drive

As digital media becomes more and more popular, our computers are needing more and more hard drive space. With the price of high capacity hard drives continuously hitting lower prices, it's now not just computer enthusiasts who are adding new drives to their new computers.

While it is relatively simple, particularly with Sata hard drives, to add a new drive - it is not immediately definite to everyone how to start using a new drive. You have the hard drive connected correctly, it is recognized in the system Bios, but it is missing from 'My Computer'.

Hard Drive

That is because it has not been formatted. The word 'partition' is usually connected with one bodily drive being split into more than one logical drive - but actually, Every hard drive needs a partition - even if it is the full size of the disc.

Windows has its own tool for this job - called 'Disk Management'. Unlike 'My Computer', it shows every drive connected to the system - formatted/partitioned or not.

Access it by Right clicking on 'My Computer', and choosing 'Manage'. In the left-hand pane, elect 'Disk Management' Now, in the right-hand pane, you will see your Hard Drives and visual Drives - hopefully along with the new drive which will show up as 'unallocated space'.

New disks appear as Not Initialized. Microsoft state that if you start Disk supervision after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk. If for any intuit it does not, you can initialize it manually. Just right-click on the new disks 'label' (the gray box to the right of the black bar that denotes the unallocated space), and elect 'Initialize'.

When done, you can begin to format the drive. Here are the instructions to originate a single partition the full size of your new drive. Right-click unallocated space on the basic disk you want to format, and then click New Partition. In the New Partition Wizard, click Next, elect 'Primary Partition', click Next. Do Not originate a dynamic disk here unless you know what you are doing, and specifically want one. Once created, there's no going back without wiping the drive.

Specify the full size of the disk in the 'Partition size in Mb' box and then click Next. Assign a drive letter to the drive, click Next to format the partition, click 'Format this partition with the following settings', type a name for the drive in the 'Volume Label' box if you want to, and select 'Ntfs' in the 'File System' box. Do not change the 'allocation size', or enable compression in the options.

I would also propose not performing a 'quick format' on a brand new drive. The full format checks the full covering of the disk.

Now go and grab something to eat/drink, as on a large drive this could take a while.If you want to originate more than one partition on the disc, the steps are similar, apart from the size of the partition you will be creating. To originate a second partition on the disc, elect the remaining unallocated space and repeat the steps.

Partition A New Hard Drive