How do I install my new hard drive?

aqueoushumour01

Hi. I recently bought a new Western digital SATA 2.5" hard drive for my laptop and an enclosure. I put the hard drive in the enclosure, and plugged the enclosure into the USB port. My laptop recognised the device but nothing appears in My computer. I can hear the disk spinning. I went into device manager and under 'disk drives' there's my internal drive and 'generic external usb device' Any ideas of what's going wrong? i'm running win xp

aqueoushumour01

i've just had another look in device manager, and viewed the properties of the external device - after populating the 'volume' information, the correct amount of space is shown i.e. 238 GB so the hard drive must be recognised by the compter as it can read its capacity. I just don't know how to get it to work! Is it maybe something to do with the BIOS? (Not that i know my way around it )

Cat695

are you on vista or Xp??

if vista try this...right click on compter in the start menu and select manage

in the centre you will see storage double click that

then you will see disk management (it will take a couple of seconds to populate) then yiou will see all the harddrives on your laptop

right click on the one you have just fitted and you should have the option to format it once its formatted it will show up in my computer if not it might just show new simple volume do this then follow the wizard

once done it will show up in my computer

aqueoushumour01

i'm running XP but I've just done what you described. At the top, the only drive to appear is my C: drive, but at the bottom it recogises that there is another disk, displays its capacity (under which it says unallocated) but says it isn't initialised. When i right click there is an option to initialise it - i suppose this is what i need to select but I'm unsure . should i go for it?

Cat695

yep thats the one (just different wording in xp)

aqueoushumour01

i have just initialised it - now i can create a partition but i'm not sure what letter to assign the disk. the issue is that i will be cloning my current drive and then replacing it with the hard drive that is in my enclosure now (the one i need to partition) so surely i need to give it the same letter so will boot up automatically BUT if i do, won't that cause problems since data will be copied from C to C - the computer will get confused wont it? or, can i just call the drive D and it will become C once the cloning software has finished so i can put the drive inside my laptop and boot from it?

Cat695

does it now show up in my computer?? whats the drive letter for it? did you format the drive?
all i can guess is that even though its a SATA drive because its connected by USB it needs to have a "jumper" (small plastic cap that sits over to connectors next to where you would plug the cable in) that tells your pc its the slave and not the master (if the jumper is left off then it automaatically seen as a master)

now you can have 2 masters (in thoery you can have 2 hard drives and 2 optical drives) and 2 slaves......so i can't see it being a problem

aqueoushumour01

I haven't got a cap, but I will need it to be the master drive anyway once I've cloned my current drive. I've initialised the hard drive, but I haven't yet partitioned it (is this the same as formatting?) It doesn't show up in my computer - i suppose i need to partition it first and choose a drive name during the process. I'm going to partition it in the next hour to see if that brings it up in My Computer - it is still described as 'unallocated' in drive management, although the disk is now online.

bob_a_builder

can i just call the drive D and it will become C once the cloning software has finished so i can put the drive inside my laptop and boot from it?

Yes : the drive letter is just a way of identifiying it to the OS - the drive itsself has no knowledge/concept of driver letter

now you can have 2 masters (in thoery you can have 2 hard drives and 2 optical drives) and 2 slaves......so i can't see it being a problem

Some confusion here between PATA and SATA
PATA alllowed more than one drive on teh bus hence having to identify by jumpers (cap?) which was master and slave
SATA only has one drive per cable

Donnie

You can't have same drive letter. Don't worry, I'm sure that when you put the new HDD in the place of the old drive it will be recognised as the C drive.

aqueoushumour01

it's in the process of formatting now and it appears in 'My Computer' so it's looking good. Thanks everyone for your comments (although something else will probably happen later and i'll post again for more advice!)