[Brigg]

Out Model railroad club was recently donated a fairly new recycled Dell Optiplex 745 computer with two SATA hard drives. The SATA-0 or C: drive works fine and has Windows Vista business on it. The second hard drive SATA-1 has a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB 7200 hard drive that shows up in the BIOS and also the Windows device manager>disk drives with ID: HDS728080PLA380 ATA, and under the "Volumes" tab, windows says the drive is not initiated. The drive does not show up in the Windows Explorer or with any other windows programs. Because it registers in BIOS and Device manager I believe it is a good drive, but may have been wiped by the IT department of the donating company and not reformatted. I am at a loss as how to format the drive or progress further in recovering its use. I can take it back to the company IT department but may not see it again for many weeks. I tried the Hitachi web site for a formatting DOS program but had no luck. Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Capt. Brigg

[compnovo]

Brigg, on 10 December 2011 - 12:16 PM, said:

Out Model railroad club was recently donated a fairly new recycled Dell Optiplex 745 computer with two SATA hard drives. The SATA-0 or C: drive works fine and has Windows Vista business on it. The second hard drive SATA-1 has a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB 7200 hard drive that shows up in the BIOS and also the Windows device manager>disk drives with ID: HDS728080PLA380 ATA, and under the "Volumes" tab, windows says the drive is not initiated. The drive does not show up in the Windows Explorer or with any other windows programs. Because it registers in BIOS and Device manager I believe it is a good drive, but may have been wiped by the IT department of the donating company and not reformatted. I am at a loss as how to format the drive or progress further in recovering its use. I can take it back to the company IT department but may not see it again for many weeks. I tried the Hitachi web site for a formatting DOS program but had no luck. Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Capt. Brigg

Have you checked in Disk Management to see if it has been ititialized and/or assigned a drive letter? Sometimes when you add a used drive that has already been assisned a drive letter it conflicts with another drive with the same letter.
All you need to do is hit the Start button and type in Disk Management and hit enter. Your new drive should show up so you can see if it has a drive letter or needs initializing.
Hope this helps...

This post has been edited by compnovo: 10 December 2011 - 12:33 PM

[Brigg]

I did it, I did it, I did it!!!
I went to Control Panel>Admin tools>computer management>Disk Management and there it was and Windows said it was not initialized and I could initialize it with a new drive letter and then format the drive. yahoo!!!
Thanks COMPNOVO for your response, I was doing it as you suggested. Some times I find the answer just by poking around until I stumble across it.
A very happy Capt. Brigg