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Good evening,

I've just bought and fitted a new 160Gb hard drive as my main one is only 40Gb. Ive fitted it into the PC alongside the main one and plugged in the power plug and slave cable. When i switched on the PC, it said there was new hardware and has installed it.
When i look in the system information, it says the disk is not initialised, and when i look at the amount of space in "C" drive, it still only displays the free space on the old drive....(19.7Gb)
How can i get my PC to use the new disc in conjunction with the original "C" disc and boost my overall storage space...??

Many thanks,

DAVESNASH756

PC is an e machines 2240....

Hi Dave,

Welcome to PCHF.

It's not really standard to split your storage over two disks. Normally, you will have a seperate drive for your windows installation, and your second drive would show as D: or E: for example.

You can initialise the disk from Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. You can right click on your disk, inititalise and format it from here.

If you really want to span your space across two seperate disks, then you would be looking at setting up what is known as "RAID5". You can read more information about this from here: Introduction to RAID5

Ok, ive just started to format the drive now, how can i use the disc then if i don't use the RAIDS method.... just select the drive and save stuff to it....?
many many thanks by the way...1

Yep, just like you would to a floppy disk. It depends what you would like to use it for, you may create your own seperate folders on the drive called Movies, Mp3's e.t.c., or when installing software, you can select your new hard drive instead of installing everything on C:

Realised one mistake as well when I was talking about RAID5. You need a minimum of 3 disks in your PC to use this in any case, so really not a good idea for you!


EDIT: Marked as answered Dave.