New HD Help

[Omikse]

I bought a new Seagate Barracuda 1 TB sats 7200 rpm 32 mb cache for my wifes comupter because her old one started clicking and would not boot up. I got it hooked up and tried to run a clean install of Vista but it could not see the hd when it came time to choose where to install. I thought that it might need formatting so I too it out of her comp and put it in my comp to format it but my computer does not see it as well. I can find it in the device manager but no where else. What needs to be done for me to get my computers to see it?

[Ponch]

Apparently the drive is OK on your computer. You can't frormat a hard disk out of the box, to be more precise, you format a partition, not a disk, so you first need to create a partition (or more of them, according to your needs) and you can do so in Computer Management/Disk Management. The drive letter appear after that, unless you choose not to give it one. Maybe this is what you call "seeing the drive"; see it in Windows Explorer.

More worrying is the fact that the Vista installation does not see it in your wife's computer. Vista should be able to see the disk, offer you to create partitions and format the future system partition. But maybe here to you got confused and the disk appears not with the drive letter but as "Unpartitionned Space" ? Does the drive appear correctly in Bios screen (on her computer)?

[Tripredacus]

For Vista, you may need to provide the Mass Storage drivers. If Vista needs these, it should prompt you for them and provide a browse button.

On the other computer, you can initialize the disk from Disk Management. But even if you end up creating a partition and formatting it there, it still may not be detected in the other PC by Vista Setup if those drivers are missing.

[Omikse]

Sorry for taking so long to reply but going through Disk Management worked. Thanks for the help.