trouble adding hard drive

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xstarbuckx

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Disk Management won't format new hard drive

okay, so i'm not a tech...please go easy on me. If I'm not providing enough info please ask for more.

I've got XP (home) and am trying to add a second hard drive (see below for specs). It's showing up in BIOS as a slave to my original drive, which is what I wanted. It doesn't show up in My Computer, yet. I went into Disk Management and it's showing up there (apparently my OS doesn't have fdisk? it doesn't show up when I try to run it). At first, the drive wasn't enabled but I fixed that and now it's reading as online. I've been told that it will show up in My Computer after it's formatted and this is where I run into a problem.

In the Disk Management window my new drive shows up in the graphical and disk views but not in the volume view. When (in graphical view) I right click on the disk information to the right my choices are Properties and Help. Under Properties, it says (again) that the device is enabled, online and that the drivers are loaded. I see no options to format or assign a drive letter.

When I right click on the disk details on the left of the graphical view (which just says that the space is unallocated), my options are New Partition, Properties and Help. I was told that I don't need to partition the drive (b/c I just want extra memory space) but I created an extended partition anyway when it seemed like I had no other options. Creating an extended partition does not give me any new drive options so, I've since erased the partitioning.

I've not been able to find any available options which would a) format the drive, or b) allow me to assign a letter to it. I know enough to be able to format from the command prompt if I have a letter for the drive.

All the postings I've seen on the Web say that there should be an option to format in Disk Management. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks!

Hard Drive:
Storage Capacity 250GB
Manufacturer Western Digital Corporation
Interfaces/Ports 1 x 40-pin IDC Ultra ATA IDE/EIDE
Form Factor 3.5" 1/3H Internal
Shock Tolerance 65Gs @ 2 ms Read Operating
250Gs @ 2 ms Non-operating
Manufacturer Part Number WD2500BB
Dimensions 1.028" Height x 4" Width x 5.787" Depth
Rotational Speed 7200 rpm
Data Transfer Rate 748Mbps Internal Maximum
100MBps External Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6)
66.6MBps External Ultra ATA/66 (ATA-5)
33.3MBps External Ultra ATA/33 (ATA-4)
16.6MBps External Mode 4 PIO
16.6MBps External Ultra ATA/33 (ATA-4)
 
To create a new partition, right-click unallocated space on the basic disk where you want to create the partition, and then click New Partition.

Click the type of partition that you want to create (either Primary partition, Extended partition, or Logical drive), and then click Next.

You can't really do anything with the extended partition, it's just a container for the logical drives. But you need the extended partition before you can create logical drive.

To create a new logical drive in an extended partition, right-click free space on an extended partition where you want to create the logical drive, and then click New Logical Drive.

Once you have the logical drive, or primary partition...then you can format.
 
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