Roger DeReu: Hi, this is the Free Computer Consultant. I want to do a screencast here on the initialization of a new drive. We can find this sometimes when we plug in a new USB hard drive and there is a drive letter signed. Now, I have done a recent screencast showing how you can assign a drive letter if that device is all setup and ready to go, it's been useable in another machine. But if it's brand new, it may not even be initialized and we are going to show you how to do that.
So, if you have the My Computer icon, I have mine renamed, but you can right click and select manage and you get this computer management console here and -- in this disk management. But there are a couple of other ways getting here also. You can select the start menu and if you have the computer icon here, you can right click and again select manage or you can click the run command and type in this command that I have here compmgmt.msc, that's computer management console, click OK and that will pop up here and we can select this management.
Now we do that, Windows XP is already figured out that we've got a new disk here. So, it pops up this wizard automatically or just kind of click next and select one or more disks to initialize, there is only one disk here, so this is disk two. We could look for confirmation of that back here what it is, but I know that's the drive that we've just plugged in. So, I'll click next, hence just going to initialize that disk so that Windows can use it. Here you see disk zero is my hard disk, disk one is a zip drive and disk two is this new USB external hard drive that I have plugged in. We are going to do is we are going to create a partition here. We are going to right click and select new partition and the wizard comes up.
So, you click on next and it asks what kind of partition you want to create. A lot of people get confused here, they have problems down the road, if they select extended partition. The only time you really want to do that is if you want to have more than four partitions on one physical drive and that hardly anybody needs to do that especially any more, once while you might be in special circumstance.
Always select primary partition. In this case, I'm going to create the entire available space as one partition, you can do it differently for different reasons, but I have no reason to do that here, it's an external drive and I want the max available space, so, I'll click next. Notice this automatically prompt me to assign to drive letter, and it should be an unassigned drive by default. If it is for some reason conflicting, you could then set it to something else. We are going to tell not to assign the drive letter right now. You can have a not formatted partition or formatted. We're going to go ahead and have it formatted. NTFS is the default, and that's what I recommend, that's a better file system more likely to recover from any errors than a standard FAT or FAT32 even. Allocation size, default and for volume label, I'll just put USB Ext for external.
Now here on a new drive, you may not want to select perform a quick format. It will be a lot quicker but you really wanted to do a full format the first time and make sure that it checks for bad sectors. If this drive has been used before and you're just trying -- wipe out the data, so it's not in the way anymore, it still could be underweighted -- securely that way but if you want to just quick format, just get your things back to zero. You can do that then but I am going to leave that unchecked for right now because this is a brand new drive and I select next and click finish. We will get a status here that will show us. It's got this drive, it's assigned a letter 'K' and it's formatting it. It should give us some status here as it goes along and let us know when it's done. There you can see that it's just popped up 1%.
That'll take a while and we are not going to watch the whole thing but this is pretty much the conclusion, I mean we have the new drive initialized, it's formatting, it will be ready to go, it's drive letter K and we can use the drive and we did use a primary partition for the new partition. So that's the filter screencast. Please visit my website www.freecomputerconsultant.com. I've got a lot other things there, other videos or the tips and tricks and you can sign up my newsletter. Thanks for watching.
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