Installing an external USB Hard Drive on a Windows XP computer

Unfortunately you can't just put a drive in the case, plug it in and it will work. You will need to initialize and format the drive before it will show up in "My Computer" or Windows explorer.

• Go into -> control panel
  -> Administrative tools
  -> Computer Management
  -> Disk Management
• Select the new hard drive which should appear like the drive pictured below (Unallocated)

• Click the left pane of the hard drive, not the space section (see below)

  LEFT pane  |                    RIGHT pane (space)

• Right click and select "initialize disk"
• Click "OK"

• Right click the right part of the display - the partition display part, and select "New Partition".
  this starts the New Partition Wizard
• Select Primary Partition.
• Leave the partition size alone unless you want several partitions
• Either let windows choose the drive letter or change it to what you want.
• I suggest assigning “U” as the drive letter to represent USB
• Make sure you don’t assign a letter early in the alphabet (i.e. A, B, C … G, H, I) as you machine may already have used it during a software installation. Even though the new drive will probably work – it will shift drive letter further into the alphabet and cause unpredictable results
• If you want use NTFS or change to the file system you need.
  Use the default allocation unit, if that fits your needs, or use another if that will better fit your storage needs.
• If you are storing large files, larger allocation units will give better performance.
• Finish the wizard.

• Formatting will take quite awhile for larger disks.
• Have a beer or any other favored beverage, or two.
• When finished, the drive will appear as below, "Healthy".

• The drive will now show up in "My Computer" and Windows explorer, etc.

Ready for use!