Activating harddirve

[Maxico]

Ok I stepped up in the hard drive stakes recently (I had a 20 gig, now its 120) We want to keep both in the computer, and the new ones in but we cant remember the commands to activate it. We have Windows XP and a gigabyte dual bios mother board. Does anybody know how to activate it?

[Dr Unne]

Not sure what you mean by "activate". Once you boot, see if Windows found a new drive, i.e. look in My Computer for it. Windows should automatically find new drives if they're installed, and it should automatically assign them a drive letter and such. If Windows found the drive you just have to format it, then you can use it. Right click on it and pick Properties or whatever look around in that window, an option for formatting is probably in there somewhere.

If Windows hasn't found the drive, see if your hard drive came with a CD or disk and use that.

[Maxico]

Well It hasn't assigned a drive name. I checked the add/remove hardware and found that it was listed there but when I clicked on it it just said this device is working properly and nothing else. It didn't come with a CD or anything. It aparantly needs to be initalized, but I dont know whats really going on with it. The person who brought it said he used to know a command to run in dos that would do it but Im not sure how reliable his knowladge is.

[Dr Unne]

According to a quick googling,

"Right click on My Computer and select Manage. On the following screen, select Disk Management. The drives should show up on the right hand side of the screen, you can then assign a drive letter."

[Killy]

If it is anything like when I installed my HD, you should go to the manifacturer's website, dowload boot disc to properly format you hard drive. Mine wouldnt show up until I formatted it.

[Peegee]

Is it set up as slave/master? You can't have two drives on your computer unless one is the master and one is the slave. Set that up first. When you boot, it should work perfectly, otherwise you might (should, since 120 gigs is scarily big) need to partition/format it.

[Endless]

If the drive is visible in the property manager, then it's set properly. Unne gave the steps to have it formatted/mounted on XP.

[Maxico]

Thanks everybody. I did what Dr unne said and it worked not sure if its slave/ master or such though. Now I just need to work out what to fill it with.

[Dr Unne]

If you have two drives on the some cable set as master, won't the BIOS refuse to even boot?

[crono_logical]

I think it doesn't find either, but I can't remember, it was a long time ago I did that, and it was with 2 CD drives anyway It might even be dependent upon the BIOS too for all I know.

[Doomgaze]

I'm assuming he has both drives set to cable select - the chances of him accidently setting the jumpers to master and slave are nigh impossible.

[Endless]

He can have both set as master, Doom, remember there are two IDE channels. As long as they're not on the same cable, it's okay.

[Peegee]

Holy crap I just learned something! Thanks Endless

[Doomgaze]

Yeah, Raf, but the second IDE cable probablly has a CD-ROM on it - I doubt he had a HD and a CD-ROM drive on one cable, and the other one empty.

But... does a single drive work if it's set to Master? Doesn't it have to be set to single drive?

[crono_logical]

If there's a single drive on a channel, then I think it'll work as long as it's not set to slave - it'll definitely work as Master though, since that's how the PCs I used used to be set up before having all 4 default slots filled was a necessity