Hello hope u can help I have just purchased a new SATA 250Gb HD to add to the current 160gb SATA HD enabled on my Abit AS8 motherboard, When i booted the computer the BIOS recognises the new HD and upon entering windows the balloon, "found new hardware" poped up with the model number of the HD and the manufacturer (Maxtor 6L250so). However in My Computer the new HD is not visible. I have tried the SATA driver disk that came with the motherboard but no joy... What am i missing? Thanks Neil (a novice when it comes to computers)

ok, sorry i have just found 1/2 the answer from anther post.... you need to format the disk before windows will recognize it as a drive. right click on my computer and go to manage, then goto storage and under that disk magement from there you will see it and be able to format it. how do you format it? is it via a new partition? and if so is it a primary partition or an extended?

If you have Roxio GoBack, then this may help- Hard Disk Does Not Appear in My Computer or in Windows Explorer http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330140

There in Disk Management, I think you just right click the drive, then click Format.

The Maxtor hard drive should have come with a Maxtor CD called MaxBlast4. You can boot up to that cd which has the utility to format/partition your new hard drive. That is the easiest way to get your drive going if your new at it. You might have to change your BIOS settings so that your CD-rom drive boots first. Then you can boot to that MaxBlast cd. Mark

"how do you format it? is it via a new partition? and if so is it a primary partition or an extended?" Your choice. If you so choose you can make it a single partition. In doing so it would have to be Primary. If you decide to make more than a single partition then the first one will be primary and the other will be Extended. You can then choose to further breakdown the Extended partition into smaller volumes. For better information use Windows Help and Support searching for "Manage disks" and then look in the How to... section. Bryan