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, frankly, huge capacity hard drives continuously hitting new lows, 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 obvious 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’.
That is because it has not been formatted.

The word ‘partition’ is usually associated with one physical 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 selecting ‘Manage’. In the left-hand pane, select ‘Disk Management’ Now, in the right-hand pane, you will see your Hard Drives and Optical Drives - hopefully including the new drive which will show up as ‘unallocated space’.

New disks appear as Not Initialized. Microsoft state that if you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk. If for any reason 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 select ‘Initialize’.When done, you can begin to format the drive.

Here are the instructions to create a single partition the full size of your new driveRight-click unallocated space on the basic disk you want to format, and then click New Partition.

In the New Partition Wizard, click Next, Select ‘Primary Partition’, click Next. DO NOT create 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 choose ‘NTFS’ in the ‘File System’ box. Do not change the ‘allocation size’, or enable compression in the options.

I would also suggest not performing a ‘quick format’ on a brand new drive. The full format checks the full surface 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 create more than one partition on the disc, the steps are similar, apart from the size of the partition you will be creating.

To create a second partition on the disc, select the remaining unallocated space and repeat the steps.

You might also want to look at Microsoft’s own Knowledge-base article on the subject http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000