How to format hard drive correctly?

[James75]

How do I format my new hard drive correctly? I’m running on vista. Vista recognizes it and asked me to format it. The thing is I failed. Now, it won’t show up in windows explorer. But it is still active in device manager through control panel. I’m quite a newbie. I would really like to learn. I need your comments. Thanks

[Dizzy]

I think I might help you. Proceed to “control panel”, then administrative tools, then to computer management, then storage. Double click on it to select the “Disk Management tool. Then, look for the drive showing the unallocated drive space. It appears darker than the rest. Right click on it to select the create new partition option and to see if you can create one there. I think it can be seen on SATA drive. You have to initialize it before you format it by clicking the disk box in storage manager. It’ll take you seconds in partitioning. And, I strongly recommend a full format so that partition is really complete. Some just prefer quick format option. A few spare in your time would be required just to make sure. Good luck!