installing new hard drive - help?

[Booington]

Hi

I've just installed a new hard drive, on top of my old one. The old one was 40GB and the new one is 300GB - so now I have two drives of 340GB.

It is installed properly, ie the computer is much faster and on device manager it says "this device is working properly" but the problem is, is that when I go into "My Computer" it only shows the 40GB hard drive icon - the "C" drive, for some reason the computer is not recognising the second one - there is no icon.

When I right click onto "My Computer" icon, then go to "manage" it has a message saying "snap-in fail to initialize" so I can't format the new hard drive.

Please help? What do I do?

PS: I have Windows XP.

[Sweet Cognac]

We did the same thing. We went out and bought a 300 gig and tried to install it. It didn't work.

Apparently Windows is only setup for 137 gig. Anything more than that you have to install a pc card to make windows recognize the large drive.

Well, we installed the pc card, and it still doesn't work, so now the 300 gig sits as storage. :(

I feel like we got ripped off, and I do not recommend anyone getting a harddrive bigger than 100 gig.

Sometimes bigger is not better.

[Booington]

That sounds a bit ominous... I've heard that the way to get round that is to "partition" the 300gb hard drive into 'portions' so that it is usable, but I can't even get to that bit! Computer says noooo......

The nightmare is that my 40gb drive is seriously low on space :-/

[The Contractor]

Have you run setup in your system bios and initialized the drive? Is the drive identified correctly in your system bios? Do you have the proper jumper pin settings for your setup?

If it is, and your system does indeed support a drive that size, use the following info to Partition your drive if you don't own PartitionMagic or a similar program:
[support.microsoft.com...]

Also, make sure if you use a program such as tweakui, Windows PowerToys etc. you do not have additional drive letters "unchecked".

[2oddSox]

An obvious, but often overlooked step is to visit the manufacturer's website and look through the support and FAQ sections. Last time I had issues with a drive not being recognised the problem was fixed easily with a patch downloaded from the manufacturer.

[Booington]

Hi

In answer to the following questions:

Have you run setup in your system bios and initialized the drive? - for some reason the pc won't let me access the computer management option, keeps saying "snap-in failed to initialize". I assume this is what you meant. Not sure how to get around that one.

Is the drive identified correctly in your system bios? Not sure on that one, the pc has recognised that there is a new drive though.

Do you have the proper jumper pin settings for your setup? yes, they are all correct.

As far as I know the drive is too big, I need to "partition" it but not sure how

[The Contractor]

Have you run setup in your system bios and initialized the drive? - for some reason the pc won't let me access the computer management option, keeps saying "snap-in failed to initialize". I assume this is what you meant. Not sure how to get around that one.

Nope, has nothing to do from within Windows. This is in your system bios. Most PCs have a key etcetera when booting like holding down the Esc key, F2, F1, F10 key etc. Once the system recognizes the drive, then follow the instructions given at the link from Microsoft.