Hey everyone; Happy Halloween!!!! My question is this....I have a second hard drive in my computer, I would like to format it, so do I need to make it the primary hard drive and then format it with my XP cd? It has Xp Pro on it but I went to a bigger hard drive, so Im not sure if I need to make it the primary just for the formatting process. Thank you for your intelligent responses. Katie

No you do not have to make it the primary to format it. It can be formatted as a Master/Slave on the secondary of slave on the primary if required. Connect the drive as you wish. Boot Windows and go into Control Panel/Administrative Tootls/Computer Management. Click Disk Management and you will then see you new drive as Disk 1 with unallocated space. You can partition and format from there. Be aware that you can only have one primary partition active on a disk at one time. If you want to partiton your drive into more than one disk you need to create an extended partition then logical drives within that partition. Stuart

i'm kinda confuesed.. maybe i need sleep So you want to format your drive that you ARE NOT running windows off of? no you won't need to make it the primary... If you want to put windows onto it again, you will have the option of selecting which hard drive to install to when you are in the windows setup. If you just want to format it to get it blank, go to your "My Computer" right click the drive, and select "Format..." Good Luck.

I was under the impression that this second drive was a brand new, never before been used hard disk. If it is already in the computer and is partitoned then formating it from My Computer is the way to do it. Stuart

Ok, Im sorry for not making myself more clear. I built a new computer, and in my new computer I installed my hard drive out of my old computer as a second hard drive. To use for storage. Well it still has XP on it and there is no need to have XP on it anymore, I simply want to use the second hard drive for storage. When I try and format it through my computer I get a message saying that "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities and other programs that are using the drive and try to format again./ Well there is nothing using the drive,now what?

katie... start >>> my computer>>>right klik on the drive >>>>>>format.then select if you want to do a quik format (whitch will just delete all the stuff on it or a full format that will be a true format ..and choose it to be formatted as ntfs ...not fat 32 ...but thats just me.. hope this helps... same as you would do for a floppy disk basically.. Oz

Yes I do do that but it only offers me to do a quick format or compress the disk. and i still get the same message.