HELP - Installing a second SATA hard drive

[Dazbo666]

Apologies in advance if I'm asking a newbie question, but I've been away from the PC upgrade scene for a while - I've recently been upgrading my PC, and currently have a SATA drive as my master C: and an external drive as a backup.

I've recently bought a second internal SATA drive and tried installing it last night...
The PC recognised the new hardware, apparently installed it successfully, and the device manager shows that the new drive has been recognised - but when I click on "My Computer", it's still only got my original C: visible ??

I remember in the distant days of IDE drives, that you had to get the jumper setting correct for the PC to properly recognise your drives... but I'm not aware of any jumper pins on SATA drives, so I'm assuming it's a matter of changing a setting from within windows??

(For the record I'm running Vista Home Premium, a GeForce 7050M motherboard, and AMD dual core 5200 CPU)

[ma10]

Have you checked in "Disk Management" to see if your new drive is shown there and simply requires formating before usage?

How to manage your disks using only Windows Vista's Disk Management tool

[Dazbo666]

All I've done so far is to connect it up, restart the PC, and have a look in the "system properties"
I'll try your Disk Management suggestion later today

[synaesthesia]

Dont worry

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. It should bring up the Computer Management Console.
Click "Storage" and then Disk Management in the next box.
It should then display the drives you have and one will be showing without a partition on it. You should be able to right click the new drive and make a new partition then format it - after this it will appear in My Computer and be fully usable The default options it may ask for will be fine

[Maccer101]

Plus I think you may have to Initialise it in Disk manager before you can format it, this may auto appear when you go into disk management,either that or it should be a right click.

[Dazbo666]

Thanks for all the constructive advice. I'll hopefully be sorting it out tonight after I finish work

[Dazbo666]

With all that valuable advice from yesterday, I managed to initialise and format the new drive late last night... so now I have plenty of new storage for all my favourite films, game demos and MP3's