Vista cant detect my 2nd Hard drive

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Prophet

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So, i have vista installed on a RAID0 array ( 2x250Gb WD's) and a 500Gb for storage/backup. When i installed vista, it showed my 500Gb on the display when it ask's you where you want to install, its shown in BIOS, and shown in the device manager. I can even run diagnostics on with the WD diagnostic programs. But in "My computer" its not shown....i have no way of accessing it.

I have zero filled the HD, its completly clean, yet no matter what i try, i cant access it.

Any suggestions?
 
You will find the Disk Management tool in the Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage section. Each partitioned and formatted drive will have a logical drive letter designated for it.

The WD 500gb will see some 465gb of unallocated space on it while others will show a healthy NTFS type partition or a disk total if a cd or dvd is in an optical drive at the time. The screen shot here shows two WD 500gb sata models as well as a 250gb ide HD and two optical drives.

 
My 500Gb Hd isnt displayed :(

Only my RAID0 array and optical drive are.

Can i format it any other way? just a thought, but can i boot from my vista disk, then format using that?
 
The drive tools on the Vista installation disk or the free Linux drive tool GParted will easily create any size partition on the drive. If the Disk Management tool you first right click on the drive when seen there to choose the create partition option. The MS page shows the following.

To create and format a partition (volume)
When you create partitions on a basic disk using Disk Management, the first three volumes you create will be formatted as primary partitions. Beginning with the fourth volume, each volume will be configured as a logical drive within an extended partition. For more information, see What are partitions and logical drives?

1. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

2. In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.

3. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume.

4. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next.

5. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next.

6. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the partition, and then click Next.

7. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following:

• If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next.

• To format the volume with the default settings, click Next.


8. Review your choices, and then click Finish.


http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Wi...d35e-efdf-406c-a049-0860180129a71033.mspx#EFB

One quick guide for partitioning and formatting drives while booted with the Vista dvd is seen at Create New Partition Using The Vista DVD.
 
Click start right click My computer select manage select disk management. It should show the drives there.
 
The Storage item is seen in the middle column second item when doing that to simply things. The one thing Microsoft did with Vista is provide a better drive partitioning tool with the option to resize existing partitions as well as now seeing the separate format option on the dvd.

With XP you could only create and delete adjusting the size when going to create a new one only. The installer would then have to format it if Windows was going on. The DM was also limited to create, delete, and format there.
 
Vista also sees the manage option when right clicking on the MyComputer icon. The preference here however is still GParted live for cd 0.3.3.0 release. The free Linux drive tool known as the Gnome Partition Editor still seems to have the better hardware detection
 
Wow i'm blind, when i went into disk managent i only looked at the drives that were recognised, i didnt bother to look down at the list of available drives. I noticed my 500Gb right away and formatted it.

Thanks guy, been trying everything to get that drive to work, but being new to vista i didnt know my way around the control panel.
 
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