Hi all, I have just purchased a "sata" hard drive and an external housing for it, when I plug it into the laptop USB it registers as "mass storage device found" but when I go to "My Computer" (win Xp Pro) there is no drive shown, only the laptop's C & D drives? if I go to the devices manager and click on the "disc drives" it is shown on there and when I double click it shows as device working normally, but when I click on the "volumes tab" it shows as "not initialized" so I assume the drive needs to be formatted?? if so how do I do this???

nigel, June 2010

Everything you need is probably here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6026_format-hard-drive.html

Simon Croft, June 2010

The only place I can see the drive is in the "device Manager" and when I right click on it there it does'nt give me the option of formatting it?

nigel, June 2010

If you can see the device right click on it and it should show you the FORMAT choice.Relist if it doesn't work.

Rich, June 2010