assnips

i just got a new WD hard drive. i just put the thing in ma comp and booted up okay...........NOW WHAT plz HELP ME or gimme some sort of URL...........

Grimm

If it booted up, what is the problem???

If it is a secondary hard drive it needs to be partitioned. You can do that from a dos prompt (boot to dos, don't use a window!) with the fdisk command.
Make sure you don't accidentaly partition your primary drive.

moosehead

it doesn't matter if its a primary or secondary drive. It needs to be partitioned, and then formatted.

as evilcyclops said, you can use fdisk to do that, or you can use a really nice piece of software called partition magic to do it.

Assuming that you don't have partition magic, restart your system and hit F8 and choose safe mode command prompt only.

next, run fdisk, if it doesn't run from the root directory, it can be found in c:\windows\command\

next, when fdisk starts, you'll probably see a screen asking you if you want large disk support enable, make sure yes is selected and hit enter.

next, you will see a menu of 4 or 5 choices

first, select the one that says change current drive, and change to your new drive

next, back at the main menu select create primary dos partition, you will then be able to select what size you want, either the whole disk, or a chunk of it (if you do a chunk of it, you can make additional partitions so that its all used up by repeating this step)

next, after your partition(s) are made, you will need to restart the system, let it start into windows, and then from My Computer you should see the new drive letter(s)

finally, you still need to format the new drive(s) before using them, you can do this by right click on their icons in My Computer and selecting format. Just sure you are formatting your new drive(s) and not something you already had. Depending on how your original drive is set up, the letters of the new drives may come before those of the original one, and it would suck to accidentally format the wrong drive and lose stuff

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brainsmile

answer is clear...

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Grimm

Actualy it does matter, just a little. If he repartitions his boot drive, he will lose all his data. Then the computer stops working and he has a bad day.