Vista newbie: trying to add a simple storage hard drive

[nofool]

I did a clean load of Vista Home Premium x64 on my new computer yesterday. I built the hardware system with two hard drives, but only had one of them connected when I did the OS load because I wanted to force it to one of them in particular. All went well.

Then I simply added the second hard drive, which will be a simple storage drive (and nothing else). The BIOS sees the drive, but Vista does not. Can someone tell me what I must do to get Vista to see this added-on drive? Both it, and the OS-based drive are Seagate 160GB SATA drives...nothing special.

I can't figure out why Vista won't see the added drive. This would have been done automatically in XP....

I've heard this Vista learning curve is going to be hell for a while, but I didn't think it would start already. Thank you.

[thedoug]

Check to see if it is listed in your disk manager. It may just need to be activated or partitioned.

to get to the disk manager, right click Computer (find it on your desktop, start menu, or in windows explorer),click Manage.
Under the Storage section, select Disk Management (it may take a few seconds for your drives to appear).
see if your drive is listed in there, if it is, right click it and select either mark partition as active or select format.

[nofool]

Thank you for your help! Everything's exactly where you said it would be.

Please, it is asking me now whether I want to designate the drive as MBR or GPT. This particular drive is only going to be a simple storage drive for data. Can you advise how I ought to classify it? It will never hold the operating system. Sorry to be so naive.

[thedoug]

select MBR. from what i can find with Google, GPT is used for Itanium based 64-bit computers.

[nofool]

the_Doug: Are you in Conway, Arkansas? We're sending several hundred HP jobs to your town in the next year from here in Colorado Springs! I'm staying here but a lot of people here are wondering what it's like. I've told them that I've always heard the Ozarks are beautiful and that you have lakes and rivers there. It's been like "Phoenix Lite" here in the Springs lately, except it rains more in Phoenix.

[thedoug]

Originally Posted by nofool

the_Doug: Are you in Conway, Arkansas? We're sending several hundred HP jobs to your town in the next year from here in Colorado Springs! I'm staying here but a lot of people here are wondering what it's like. I've told them that I've always heard the Ozarks are beautiful and that you have lakes and rivers there. It's been like "Phoenix Lite" here in the Springs lately, except it rains more in Phoenix.

Yeah I'm in Conway, AR. I think everyone in the state heard about HP coming here. I turned in a resume to the city's chamber of commerce (that's where they told everyone to take them to if they were interesting in jobs there).
Conway isn't in the Ozarks. The Ozarks are farther to the north, Conway is near the center of the state, along the Arkansas river. The weather here right now is hot, was around 100F earlier this week.

[nofool]

I know I've gotten us way off topic, but send me a private msg if you like. I know several of the HP sales managers here. You seem like a very well-informed, helpful person and I really appreciate the help you gave me here. I would like to give you a big postive rep, but I can't see those right now.

I only loaded Vista yesterday, so I'm going to be in newbie hell for months to come. But, Vista x64 is the way to go! There was just no sense in waiting for Windows 7. Thank you again!

[moshpit]

GPT is for large RAID arrays over 2Tb in size, not IA64

I just built several 4 and 5Tb RAID 5 arrays over the last couple days and they all had to be set as GPT drives in order to allow partition sizes over 2.something Tb in total size per array.

[thedoug]

Originally Posted by moshpit

GPT is for large RAID arrays over 2Tb in size, not IA64

I just built several 4 and 5Tb RAID 5 arrays over the last couple days and they all had to be set as GPT drives in order to allow partition sizes over 2.something Tb in total size per array.

I was just repeating what I found on some random Google result. I had never heard of GPT before nofool mentioned it.