Wiped HD clean to US Standard,Dept of Defense. Booted with another HD and also had the wiped drive attached. The wiped drive is not shown. In Disk Management it is shown as unallocated. According to what I have read, to allocate one needs to right click the drive. Rt clicking the drive in the LEFT pane, a box comes up with: Convert to Dynamic, Properties and Help. Rt clicking the RIGHT pane a box comes up with: New Partition, Properties and Help. A friend with a new HD which was unallocated had after right clicking:Initialize etc. Why the difference. I presume, in my case I would have to use the SECOND example, 'Partition' to use the drive. Just interested, (the drive in question is going to be scrapped).In the past all added drives have been cloned so have never needed to go to disk managemnt.

Did you format the HDD after wiping it? "And that's the fishing line, because Sharkboy said so!"

wiping the drive using one of those programs, usually, deletes the partition also. I would think you need to partition, then format. larry

Did not format after wiping. According to what I have read, if one clicks on the drive in unallocated it 'Should' initialize. Using Acronis I cloned the drive without doing anything other than telling Acronis to clone. My query was just for interests sake. Thanks for your replies.

Unallocated is referring to the space on the harddrive. In order to allocate the space for use by an OS you must first partition using some or all of the drive. Thus allocating some or all of the space on the drive to that partition. After which the allocated space must be prepared for use by an OS by formatting. Cloning programs are designed to work with unallocated drives so there would be no need to partition and format whan applying an image to a drive in that condition.