Does my brand new hardrive, does it need formatting ?

Danny_G

A brand new HDD is to be used as a secondary storage drive,

it is new from the packaging, does this need to be formatted?

and what way? (using the boot from windows XP cd, and format using NTFS) ?

Hd is a Seagate Baracutta
Using Windows XP Professional,
size is 2TB

or it doesn't need formatting, as it is brand new ?

custardy

no need for fancy formatting
right click and select quick format in NTFS, if thats what you are using

NiftyDigits

You can format and partition it in whichever way that you wish.

If secondary, you can do it from inside the OS.

Look here

Lum

Plug it in, turn your PC on

Right click My Computer -> Manage

Go to Disk Management and then you will need to find your new drive in the bottom/centre pannel

It will probably be labelled "Disk 1" but drives that already have stuff on will show a blue bar and a partition name (e.g. C:) your new drive will have none of these.

Right click the empty space and create a partition. This is a slightly confusing choice of name as a partition is a chunk of the drive that you make available for data, not a divider between two chunks of data.
I would probably create a single partition that spans the entire drive, since you're using this as a data dump. This is the default option.

Once you have the partition, right click it and choose format. The defaults should again be fine (NTFS, quick format)

It should then tell you that your new drive is drive E: or whatever letter is free. If you want to you can right click and change this but it's not too important.

You should find your new drive in My Computer now and will be able to start copying all your stuff to it.

The end result should look something like this: