I have just bought an HP system with Vista Home Premium installed (see My PC).

It came with a 500gb sata hdd installed. I have just installed a 2nd sata 500gb hdd. I can see the drive in device manager but not in windows explorer. I assume that is because it is not formatted. How do I do that? I don't see an option in device manager to do that.

also my first drive has 2 partitions, the C: drive and D: has Factory_Image. What is that?

thanks

D: factory image is the factory restore partition. You can use this to set pc back to factory settings. If your pc didn't come with discs - you should have an icon on the desktop which will allow you to burn a copy of the recovery partition to disc in case you ever have problems.

To format your new hard drive do the following:

Click Start > in the run dialog type: diskmgmt.msc

This will open the disk management console. Your new hard drive should be listed there. You should now be able to format it, etc.

I found how to format a drive in Vista.
Start, control panel, System & Maintenance (click on main heading), admin tools, create and format a drive. this brings up the disk management window. The top part of the window has your existing volumes, the lower panel shows the disks and images.

In my case,
Disk 0 showed 2 partitions c: d:. Disk 1 was the one I wanted to format. I right clicked Disk 1 (the left side) and selected initialize. It went through its routine then came back and said couldn't find the file!! I then right clicked on the right panel of disk 1 and did a Create Simple Volume.
Its initializing as I write.
All seems ok so far.

D: drive is possibly your recovery console wich possibly could of been used in the future to fix your Vista computer.

Yes that what I thought. Incidentally, how long should a 500gb format take??

If you chose NTFS (not the NTFS quick option) it can take awhile.

Also a shortcut to disk management is the command I posted above. You just type that in and press enter and it brings up the Disk Management, instead of having to go through control panel, etc.