How To Format A New Hard Drive Under Windows XP VISTA and 7

Most new external hard drives available in the market are designed to be plug and play, you can just plug in the hard drive and start using it straight away. This is because the manufacturers send the disk initialized and ready to work with the most common operating systems.

However the brand new internal hard disks available in the market, require to be initialised and formatted before use. The following instruction will show you how to format a new hard drive under windows system.

First of all, of cause you need to connect your hard drive with your computer. The hard will be found and will be installed by windows automatically:

The we can start to format the hard drive now.

Step 1 Login to Windows Disk Management Utility

Right click 'Computer' and select 'Manage', then you will login to the windows management utility.

Step 2 Initialize the HDD

Click 'Disk Management' in the left column, as soon as you click, a new windows will jump out and tell you that a new disk has been detected and need to be initialized, the new hard drive selectio is in black colour, instead of blue:

If no initialize window jump off, you can still right click the disk symbol to open that windows manually:

Click OK to inicialize the HDD, we normally only format as MBR style:

Step 3 Format the hard drive

Now the hard drive status has turned to 'Online', but the hard drive is still 'unallocated'. Right click and select 'New Simple Volume'

Then we can follow the Wizard to format the hard drive.

If you use default full size the hard drive will be formatted as a single partition, if you imput a smaller size, then you can format the rest of the space later as second/third etc.. partitions.

Any letter you want:

Choose disk format here and imput a volume label. Quick format is recommended because standard format will take ages to perform..

Now we finish: