When you buy an external HD casing and a new hard drive you will notice after assembling drive and casing that it’s not quite plug n’ play, but initialization and formatting is neede to make it work properly and show up in for example Windows Explorer.
1. Go to the Start menu and open the Control Panel, Administrative tools, Computer Management and then Disk Management.
2. Select the new hard drive which should appear (see picture below)
3. Right click the left solid grey panel of the hard drive (not the space allocation bar, see below).Select “initialize disk” and click “ok”.
4. Right click the right part of the display – the allocation display, and select “New Partition“. This starts the New Partition Wizard.Select Primary Partition. Leave partition size alone unless you want several partitions. Either let windows choose the drive letter or change it to what you want. If you want use NTFS or change to the file system you need. Use the default allocation unit if that fits your needs or use another if that will better fit your storage needs. If you are storing large files, larger allocation units will give better performance.
5. Finish the wizard. This will start the formatting of the hard disk and can take a few minutes for larger drives.
6. When formatted the drive will appear as healthy in the device list (see picture below). The device is now ready to use and will show up in Windows Explorer etc.
Popularity: 3% [?]