Cannot initialize a new HDD

To anyone who can or will help:

I am working on a friend's Toshiba laptop (running WVHP32), and recently had to replace his second HDD. I matched the new HDD with the old one (Hitachi model number for Hitachi model number, size for size, RPM for RPM, voltage for voltage). The BIOS recognizes the drive. 'Computer' has no indication of a HDD other than the system drive (C: . Disk Management under Administrative Tools reports the drive as unallocated space, but the option to initialize the drive is not present on a right-click or in the command menu.

Several search strings online have only pointed to mentions of a RAID utility that I cannot find on the Hitachi site. I am open to any suggestions that any of you may have.

Thank you in advance.

Rattler418

You should be able to follow this tutorial. Start with 'Step Two.' You can make it all one partition or several. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/95398-disk-management-shrink-partition.html

Hope this helps

Gary

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, in order to do anything with a partition on the new drive, it needed to be initialized first..and that is what the machine wasn't allowing me to do.

So I went over to my friend's house again to get the text of the error message (maybe I should have done that first), and when I entered that into a Google search, I came across a different forum post that mentioned a fix some guy found by accident.

It seems that if you right-click on the drive label representation in Disk management (not the representation of the drive space), you actually get the option to initialize the disk. 3 seconds to initialize, then about an hour to format (120 GB), and he now has a bona fide second physical HDD.

I again want to thank you for your time and effort in helping me to resolve this issue, have some reps.

-Rattler418

Glad you got it sorted out. I don't have that option under the drive label so didn't know about that. Thank you for posting back as I learned something too.

Take Care.
Gary