FAQ - My new hard drive does not appear in 'My Computer'

[gwendes]

I have installed my new hard drive as a slave, windows tells me I have new hardware installed but the drive but it does not show in my computer.

The reason the drive is not showing in My Computer is because it has not been partitioned or formatted.

Solution. Partition the drive using Windows Disk Management.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm

Once initialised, partitioned and formatted to the correct file system the drive will appear. If you carry out a complete format the formatting process can take anything up to a couple of hours, depending on the drive size.

*DO NOT SHUTDOWN THE COMPUTER DURING THE FORMAT*

Another handy guide can be found here.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=199419

***sometimes this can be slow to load***

If you are not using windows XP you can download drive installation tools from the drive manufacturers website. Links to these toold can be found here.

viewtopic.php?t=33 (http://forum.novatech.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=33)

[matz]

ive shuted down my pc once when it was doing disk management thingy :P it was mucked up and i had to reinstall XP :(

[KaliBR]

yea i found that out after rtying to figure why the **** drive wouldnt show ... just a simple case of (in vista) runnng the install disk and using its built in application for creating a partition and then formatting.
its a shame windows wont see the drive so you can format etc from inside the OS. :mrgreen:

[Jonny2Bad]

Go to administrative tools then comp management then disk management, it should be there just enable it. :wink: And full format of course.

[crt86t]

My back up hard drive keeps disappearing from "My Computer". I have deleted everything off it, reformatted it, several times and it then will always accept backup data from Norton 360. It then remains on the PC for a while then for no apparent reason turns its red light on and will not function again until I remove both the power and the USB cables. After this it comes back on line with a green light but Vista says I need to reformat it again. If I cancel the request to reformat I can see all the data on the disk and copy to it fine, then after a while it disappears again which is highly frustrating. The disk is a Novatech back up stand alone hard drive NOV ND3500. Device Manager states that the driver is working fine (even when it has gone wrong!) and there does not appear to be any other alternative driver for it. Any ideas?

[Jonny2Bad]

Could be a vista bug, it probably not your hdd, more a software problem i would say.

[pete10smith]

Thanks for the help. I might be able to get my new drive whcih I purchased a few days ago actaually working now!

[Mr. Lime]

I did this when I bought myself a new 1TB drive (when they were new lol) and I spent like 2 hours trying to get the ****** thing to show, before a friend pointed me in the right direction. :D