How To Detect New Hard Drive Windows 7

Yous installed a new hard drive in your computer and, to your dismay, it'south nowhere to be found. Don't panic, y'all just need to requite Windows a piddling nudge to bring information technology online.

The About Common Reason Your Disk Is Missing

Yous grabbed a nice big hard disk on sale, yous cracked open up your computer case, plugged the bulldoze into the motherboard and power supply with the appropriate cables (no? better double check that before you continue reading), and when you booted your estimator back up the new hard drive was nowhere to be found.

RELATED: How to Turn an Old Difficult Drive Into an External Drive

Or possibly you lot followed along with our external difficult drive tutorial and tin can't figure out why, fifty-fifty though yous can hear the deejay whirring abroad in the enclosure, yous don't meet the disk in Windows. What's the deal?

Unlike the hard bulldoze that ships with an off-the-shelf computer or external drive, extra hard drives you buy aren't always shipped formatted and ready to use. Instead, they're in a totally bare land–the thought is that the end user will do what they wish with the drive, so there is no benefit to preformatting or otherwise irresolute the drive at the factory.

As such, when you lot put the drive in your system, Windows just waits for yous to make up one's mind what to do with the drive instead of automatically formatting and adding information technology to the drive list. If you've never added a hard drive to your reckoner before, however, information technology can be pretty disconcerting when information technology appears like the bulldoze is missing (or, worse, expressionless). Take no fear, though! It's like shooting fish in a barrel to bring your hard drive out of hiding.

How to Bring Your Missing Drive Online

Assuming that the difficult bulldoze is installed properly, and is non, (by some horrible dumb luck) defective out of the gate, bringing information technology online is a very simple process. To do and then, you get-go need to pull upward the Windows Disk Direction tool.

Press Windows+R on your keyboard to launch the Run dialog box. Type diskmgmt.msc into the box and printing Enter.

Before we proceed, we want to appropriately scare you lot: Practice not play around in Disk Management. Although the task nosotros're about to perform is very straightforward and simple to do, if you muck around with this tool you will accept a very bad time. Double cheque every step. Make sure you're selecting the correct disk, or you tin lose lots of data.

below.In Deejay Management, gyre down through the list of disks in the bottom pane. These disks volition exist labeled "Disk 1" through however many disks you take. Windows assigns a number to all hard disks, solid land disks, USB drives, and card readers, and so don't be surprised if yous take to scroll downward a chip–in our case the new bulldoze was "Disk 10" as seen below.

There are 4 bits of information here that betoken we're looking at the right disk. Get-go, the disk is marked as "unknown" and "Not initialized" on the left, which a brand new deejay introduced to the organisation would be flagged as. Second, the drive size matches the size of the bulldoze we simply installed (effectually 1 TB), and the drive is flagged as "unallocated", which means none of the hard drive space has been formatted or assigned a partition.

Right click on the name portion of the deejay entry, where it says "Disk [#]", and select "Initialize Disk" from the right-click context menu.

RELATED: What's the Difference Between GPT and MBR When Partitioning a Drive?

In the first stride of the initilization process, you'll exist prompted to choose whether you desire to use a Master Boot Record (MBR) or a GUID Segmentation Tabular array (GPT) for the sectionalization way of your disk. If you want to practise some in depth reading earlier making a selection, you can check out our explainer hither. In short, unless you have a pressing reason to use MBR, use GPT instead–it's newer, more efficient, and offers more robust protection against corruptions of the boot record.

Click "OK" and y'all'll be returned to the main Disk Management window. There you'll find that your disk is now labeled "Basic" and "Online" on the left, but the contents are withal "unallocated". Right click on the striped box presenting the unallocated drive space. Select "New Uncomplicated Volume".

This will launch the New Simple Volume Magician to guide you through the process of setting up the deejay. In the first pace, select how much space you desire to include in the volume. By default the number is the total corporeality of available disk space–unless you're planning on reserving infinite for boosted partitions, there's no reason to change this. Click "Next".

In the second step, assign a drive letter of the alphabet. The default is probably fine.

RELATED: What'due south the Difference Betwixt FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?

Finally, format the volume. If you're using the book for routine computing tasks (storing photos, video games, etc.) in that location's no real need to deviate from the default NTFS file arrangement and settings. Curious about the differences between file systems and why you might utilize the unlike options? Nosotros've got you covered. Requite your volume a name, click "Side by side", and look for the format process to finish.

When the procedure is complete, you'll come across your new drive–allocated, formatted, and ready for action–in the Disk Management disk listing.

You tin can at present use the deejay like whatsoever other on your system for media storage, games, and other purposes.