New HDD not recognized by windows

[Airin]

Bought a new HDD

500 GB WD Black 7200

When i installed it the bios sees it, but after I load into windows off my other drive it dosnt show. It is a bare drive so does that mean i have to format it first before windows can see it?

[BicycleMafioso]

Yes.
Go into disk manager (open startmenu, type "disc" and it should appear) and format the drive, and allocate the partition as you like it.

[ispano]

You have to partition it for it to show up. This is the biggest common fallacy that happens when people buy new hard drives. I used to work at a retail electronics store, most of the returns were due to this. They don't see it in my computer, it's not working! Waaah. When I show them what they have to do, since the drives can be used by different people for different partition types, they just leave it blank. Externals are typically formatted FAT32 since that's readable by most operating systems. But internals are not formatted.

[Airin]

Yea I got it, now I also have my other drive partitioned into 700 and 200 mb partitions (had linux on half of it once)
Can I use disc manager to put that back into one?

[BicycleMafioso]

Yea I got it, now I also have my other drive partitioned into 700 and 200 mb partitions (had linux on half of it once)
Can I use disc manager to put that back into one?

Yes. You can format the lesser partition, and then increase the allocated partition.

[Berteh]

Exactly the same thing confused me :P A quick Google fixed that