3rd Hard drive issues

[bonanza2000]

OK I am clearly missing something. I have a SSD which has the operating system on it, and I have a 1TB hard drive for the data. I added a third drive 500 GB and I must have done something wrong. The BIOS sees the 3rd drive (and looks and lists them in the correct order) and when I go to device manager in Win 7 it shows all 3 drives as functioning normally but when I go to "my computer" in Win 7, I just see the first 2 hard drives (c: and d:) and of course the Blu-ray and DVD drives (e: and f:). What am I missing?

[_dangtx_]

maybe initialise,partition and format it? :)

[frontier204]

Yep it sounds like the hard disk is blank - unlike external drives, internal drives don't come pre-formatted.
Add a partition onto it with "Disk Management". It should ask you to "initialize" the disk the second the window opens, and then you can add a partition to it.

[bonanza2000]

Yeah but I can't get to it. there is no drive letter assigned to it to right click and format. How to I get to it to format it? The computer knows it is there in picture 1 but I can't find a way to format it. Picture 2 shows the drives windows sees and I can right click and format those (not that I would want to but ya know what I am saying I can get to that command)

[_dangtx_]

start, in the field search thingie write 'computer management'

and youll get there :)

[AkG]

To see the drive you want initialized you will need to go into "Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management". When its loaded...
THEN
In Disk Management, right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk. In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize. You can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

[frontier204]

Here's some more detailed instructions:

In tutorial form: How to Install and Initialize an Unformatted Hard Drive in Windows Vista and Windows 7
In video form: How to format a hard drive on your Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC (very interesting size of hard disk in that video - virtual machine perhaps?)

[_dangtx_]

hey ak, didnt you have an article on gpt vs mbr? ;)

[AkG]

Oh prolly got a link for it kicking around here somewhere dan....but the rule of thumb is: under 2tb use mbr...over 2tb use GPT. :P

[_dangtx_]

cool. but i hear for gpt you got to watch out for some stuffs? settings...:)

still use mbr on me 2tb's greens. for now.