Archive for October 24th, 2009

How to setup a new hard drive on Vista.

October 24, 2009

As of now you probably have heard of SSD, solid state drive, which is simply your thumb drive on steroids.  SSD have no moving parts and uses NAND flash memory so the have great speed and greater reliability.   With new technology old technolgy gets a discount.  Nowadays a Tera-byte hard drive is less than $100.  You can even find it even less online for around $70.  Recently, I received one as a gift from a friend.

After you install the hard drive, follow the provided installation pamphlet,  you have to set it up on the PC and format it.  Here’s how to do it.

Note: a terabyte hard drive took me a few hours to format the drive so be patience when you are formatting the hard drive.

1. In Control Panel select System and Maintenance and select Create and format hard disk partitions.

System and Maintanence

2.  Now you should see Disk Management application loaded and you should see a disk “Not initialized”.  You wan to right click on the “Disk 1″ area and select initialize.

New Simple Volume Wizard 1 - Initailize

3. If you hard drive is less than 2TB then you would want to select MBR (Master Boot Record)

Initialize Disk

4.  Now you want to right click on the “unallocated”  area and select New Simple Volume

New Simple Volume

5.  New Simple Volume Wizard pops up and you continue through.

New Simple Volume Wizard

6.  Pick a drive letter you would like to associate with that new hard drive.  I picked M for “Mass Data”.

New Simple Volume Wizard 2

7.  Here you want to leave everything as is except for the Volume label.  Change it to whatever your heart desires.

New Simple Volume Wizard 3

8. Now you are done, your new drive should show up when you click on “My Computer”.

New Simple Volume Wizard 4


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.