HD unallocated

[Chapper]

Guess I'm destined to be an eternal newb :eek:

XP Pro, have installed a new WD SATA 500GIG to be used as scratch disk. Rebooted but it doesn't show up in My computer though it shows up in BIOS & Computer Management. Device Manager says it's working properly. In comp management it shows as Disk 2 Basic Unallocated. When I right click on the drive the drop menu only gives New Partition, Properties & Help, no option for assigning a letter.
I have searched the pertinent info in MS Help & tried all the proposed actions to no avail especially since I can't right click to get Assign New Letter.
Have installed quite a few drives but never encountered this problem.
A savvy How Toer's advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks guys & gals

[Buckeye]

Download the WD tools

Look for the Lifeguard Tools program.

try this site, I am sure there are other sites, I just did a quick look
http://majorgeeks.com/Western_Digital_Data_Lifeguard_Tools_d2855.html

[Th3MadScientist]

unallocated means it needs to be formatted, once formatted you can assign it a letter.

[Chapper]

unallocated means it needs to be formatted, once formatted you can assign it a letter.

Pretty certain as a disk only for documents it doesn't have to be formatted. Thanks though.

Buckeye you did good directing me to Lifeguard. Simple as can be & a great program for other uses than allocating the disc too. Am transferring all my movies, music, etc. at this moment with Lifeguard. I truly thank you :yepp:

[crazyea]

Pretty certain as a disk only for documents it doesn't have to be formatted. Thanks though.

Buckeye you did good directing me to Lifeguard. Simple as can be & a great program for other uses than allocating the disc too. Am transferring all my movies, music, etc. at this moment with Lifeguard. I truly thank you :yepp:

Sorry, but you are wrong. If the disk is unallocated means it is not partitioned and formatted with a file system. The above poster was right, and that's probably what you did with Lifeguard.

[Buckeye]

Pretty certain as a disk only for documents it doesn't have to be formatted. Thanks though.

Buckeye you did good directing me to Lifeguard. Simple as can be & a great program for other uses than allocating the disc too. Am transferring all my movies, music, etc. at this moment with Lifeguard. I truly thank you :yepp:

np just doing my job :rofl:

Same thing happened to me a long time ago when I was using XP.

Actually all disks need to be formated, tho sometimes they come preformated.

Also Lifeguard does not work with Vista.
You would need to go to My Computer, right click and hit Manage.
Go to Disk managment and bring up your list of HD's
From there do a full format.

I had this happen to me when I took down my Raptor Raid 0 and went to use them as single drives. They would show up in the BIOS fine, and I would even get a icon for them when I opened up My Computer. However no matter what I tried I could not right click and format. I had to go into Manage/Disk Manager and format there. I think I even had to delete partitions first.

[3lfk1ng]

Pretty certain as a disk only for documents it doesn't have to be formatted. Thanks though.
:rofl::rofl::rofl:

[Vullf]

Pretty certain as a disk only for documents it doesn't have to be formatted. Thanks though.


:rofl::rofl::rofl::welcome:

[Th3MadScientist]

Take any hard disk, go into Disk Management, delete its partition and you'll see that the disk space in unallocated, repartition it and it will come back.