Installing a new S-ATA HD under Windows XP Profess…

Installing a new S-ATA HD under Windows XP Professional – The DiskPart utility way

So you bought a new S-ATA Hard Disk and can’t wait to plug it in your machine and start using it?
Ok…You have physically connected the drive (power supply, s-ata cable etc) and opened Disk Management utility (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc) just to see the new drive as unallocated…Tried to right click the disk and format it? My guess is that no format option existed…? Right?

If yes follow the steps below to see how a utility shipped with Windows 2000, Windows XP called DiskPart can save the day with a set of simple commands.

1. if you have closed Disk Management re-open it.

2. verify that the disk (i.e. disk 1) shows (as unallocated)

3. right click the disk to view available option.

4. format listed? if not then Start -> Run -> diskpart. DiskPart will help
us allocate partition(s) for the HD along with letter volumes and format accordingly.

5. inside Diskpart we will issue a set of commands marked below within “” (don’t include quotes when executing the command )

5.1 “list disks” (shows the available disks, i.e. disk 0, disk 1)

5.2 “select disk 1″ to move the focus to the new HD (an “*” appears to indicate that we have selected the disk)

5.3 “create partition primary”

Finished with our partition allocation!

From now on you can check Disk Management to see that changes by DiskPart session are immediately reflected and shown on the Disk Management window. You can now continue with the rest of the steps described below or switch to the right-click context menu of the Disk Management utility to choose drive letter for your partition volume and format the partition respectively.

5.4 “list partition” will show one and only (primary) partition created for the new HD

5.5 “list volume” will bring up a list of the drive volumes that exist on our PC.
Last in list appears a volume with no letter or label whatsoever. This is our HD’s partition created at step 5.3

5.6 “select volume [number]“,

5.7 “assign [letter]” [a letter not occupied by other drives/partitions].

5.8 Inside a DOS session (Start -> Run -> cmd) type: “format [letter assigned at 5.7] /FS:NTFS” to format the partition.