New Hard Drive

I just bought a new maxtor ide hard drive and installed it as a primary slave. It shows up on boot up and under my windows XP device manager. It says there is no problem with the drive, yet i cant access it at all!!!! theres no e: drive in my computer or anything. HELP!!!

 

You need to partition it and format it before you'll be able to use it. If you open Disk Manager (right click My Computer, Manage, Disk Manager), you'll be able to allocate a partition and format it so you can use it.

 

thanks a lot for the help, but now i have another quetion, i want to move my whole system and everything from my old drive to my new drive, is there a way to do this right? aslo, when i format my new drive, should i choose ntfs or fat32?

 

As for the fat32/NTFS.....what OS are you running? Just a rule of thumb....XP prefers NTFS....listen to others though

 

Are you going to make the new harddrive the startup (master) drive later on?

If so, I'm sure Maxtor has a disk utility that will copy everything over from the old HD including the boot files.

My Seagate HD utility has this ability.

Then it's just a matter of making the new drive the master, the old one a slave, and swapping positions on the IDE cable.