New Ultrabay Hard Drive... W500: It sees the hard drive, but no drive letter

Hello once again.

I have a Hitachi 5k500 500GB drive to use in the Ultrabay for backups and general extra storage. I made sure I bought the new version of the ultrabay meant for the T500 et al, not the older one for the T61 and before. So i plugged the drive into the adapter nad plugged the whole thing in. Windows reconizes that it exists. New Hardware dialog, finds the driver. BUT it then doesn't let me do anything with it. Windows still treats it as a DVD drive and when I click on it, Windows asks me to insert a disc. Can anybody help me?

Particualrs. Device Manager says its there and has no warnings with it that I can see. When I open up the properties tag it reconizes it as a 5k500 and assaigns a drive number, but it does not recieve a drive letter. I assume that's the problem. I guess it needs to be formated? How would I go about doing that with it?

Oh and I use XP sp3, for what it's worth.

 

Did you format the drive???

If not, you need to open up Computer Management (located under administrative tools in the control panel) and navigate to Disk Management. You then should see the physical disk with 465.66GB free but no partitions. You can then create a new partition (recommend NTFS quickFormat) and assign a drive letter. That should fix your problem.

 

That did it.

Thanks. Never did that before. Haven't had to use admin tools for disc formating before because restore media for other computers would already format to NTFS usually. I think for one I do remember having to change FAT32 to NTFS but I forgot how did that (I'm going to assume the same way you told me). Learn something new everyday.

But regardless. Something I should have known, but I'm no power user so I don't come across it daily life. Thanks for the help. I really appreciate it.