Thread: Adding a hard drive to a PC with Vista

I am a fairly savy computer guy but things change so fast now days. I have Windows Vista Ultimate (disaster) on my computer. I only have an 80 GB hard drive which is nearly full. I purchased a new 320 GB hard drive and installed it. The BIOS sees it and indicates it is good and so does the OS Device Manager. Device Manager diagnostics say it us working properly. I click on computer and no new drive. It almost has to be some sort of setting I do not know about. I have been reading of others having this problem and it seems the only thing that has ever corrected it was to format and totally rebuild your software. Any ideas?

have you tried going into computer management,then disk management.

Once in, delete all partitions on the new drive. Create new partition and format.

Right click My Computer and choose Manage. On the left, go down to Disk Management, and left click it. Then, on the right, you should see your 80 gig hard drive and the new 320 as well. In the list in the upper right, right click the new disk (on it's name) and choose Format.

Sorry to hear that your Vista Ultimate is a disaster, I quite like mine.

Originally Posted by holli4pirating

Right click My Computer and choose Manage. On the left, go down to Disk Management, and left click it. Then, on the right, you should see your 80 gig hard drive and the new 320 as well. In the list in the upper right, right click the new disk (on it's name) and choose Format.

Sorry to hear that your Vista Ultimate is a disaster, I quite like mine.

I sincerely thank both of you. These directions got me there. That was a function within Vista I had not used before and it was a really good learning lession. Thanks guys! Now I can put Linux on one of the partitions.

As for the other problems with Vista; as of three weeks ago when I last looked, either Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer had locked up a total of 189 times since the beginning of the year. I have used every Microsoft tool available to fix the problems and have multiple registry repair programs including Vista Manager. The problem is usually Windows Explorer halting. I get a message asking if I want to restart the program or do a cold start. If I restart Windows Explorer it gives me the option of returning to the point where it halted - so they know there is a problem. I am not sure what it is that Internet Explorer doesn't like.

There are times when I click on an operation and it may take 20-30 seconds to execute - all the time showing no sign of hard drive activity. Then other times it reacts instantaniously. This is without Zone Alarm being involved with an active scan of course, (I use Zone Alarm Extreme Security so that in addition to my wireless N routers firewall I am behind a software firewall too.)