How to Initialize & Format a New External Hard Drive Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
685 words · ~3 min read
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so guys this is a guide that I was inspired to make because one of my
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friends bought uh a standalone hard drive and then an enclosure for it and
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unlike the pre-done external hard drives like you
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know the ones from WD that look like this over here unlike
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those these drives when you buy a be Drive it doesn't necessarily come
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formatted so rather than walking through it on the phone I decided to just make a
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video about how to initialize a brand new drive on your computer once you
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plugged it in so I've taken a bar drive here and um yes that is not the most
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static safe way to do this but I've done it so I plugged it in Via SATA or uh
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Power and SATA data and I'm powering it up with this power supply that's
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jumpered totally ghetto setup but whatever and I'm going to show you guys
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the steps that are required in order to get your new hard drive recognized by
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your computer so the first thing you're going to do do is go to my computer and
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that'll be on your desktop if you're running Windows XP and you're going to
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go to properties then you're going to go to the device
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manager and scan for Hardware changes so
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when you scan for Hardware changes I've already done this but it'll it'll bring
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up your drive so in this case we're running a a Cate 2 tbte ATA device okay
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so that's done the next thing you have to do is right click on computer and
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click on manage so when you manage the
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computer you want to go to the Disk Management in particular and you're
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going to then see aha this message now
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if this message doesn't show up then you're going to want to scan down down
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down until you find a not initialized drive you right click on the unallocated
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space or rather you right click on the not initialized drive and you click
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initialize dis select dis okay Master
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boot record is correct so okay it takes just a moment to initialize the disc but
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you're going to see that in my computer that 2 TB Drive is still not showing up
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so what I have to do now is I take that unallocated space and I create a new
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simple volume next I want all of it I'm
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going to assign the drive letter X for
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extreme and then I don't want a label cuz a label is annoying
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and next finish so that'll take just a
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moment to format and then the computer will detect the drive local dis x two
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terabytes and we are done and now now
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that I've initialized the disc and formatted it remember these come
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initialized and formatted so that's this only applies to a bare disc I can
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actually unplug it which I'm going to do
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okay so I've unplugged it now if I refresh this it goes away
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eventually hold on I can make it go away
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device manager action scan for Hardware
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changes
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H okay well then either way I just
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showed you how to initialize and format your new Drive aha there it disappeared
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okay we're good we're good so it disappeared now and then when I take it
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and I plug it back in you don't have to watch this part it's
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okay it will not need me to perform this process again now this applies for USB
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drives firewire drives ESAT drives internal sat drives etc etc etc although
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us drives are automatically plug in place so you won't need to do that uh
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device manager bit there you go it's here it's ready to go thank you for
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checking out this video online as techtips don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews tutorials and
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