installing new HD

[DaveC426913]

So I just bought a new, bigger HD, a Hitachi 120Gb Travelstar 5K160 for my 5 year old Dell Inspiron 4150 running XP.

Eventually, I will make it my primary drive, and I'll install XP on it. For now, I'm going to keep it as my USB drive until I get my current drive's data onto it.

That's my plan.

So far, I've hooked it up and my system saw it and got it ready. But it doesn't come up as a drive on my system. This is surely because it has yet to be formatted. How can I format it?

A disk came with the HD, which it seems wants to install Windows 98. That means I could swap my old drive out and this new drive in, then boot up with the disk in and get 98 installed on my new drive. I guess then the only piece would be that I would have to have an upgrade version of XP, rather than an install.

Is there a better way to get this new drive running so that I can access it from my current system?

[mgb_phys]

Ignore the disc.
Goto control panel -> admin tools -> Computer management -> disk management ->local storage
You will need to create a primary partition and format it.

[DaveC426913]

I want to have your children.

[Enthalpy]

Avoid formatting with Win98, as you would get a Fat32 volume, which is less stable and less secure. Do it with Xp as mgb_phys said.

[DaveC426913]

Worked OK.

[mgb_phys]

Just for the archives, you can convert a fat32 partition to an NTFS one with the 'convert' command - without losing any data.

[Enthalpy]

Convert Fat32 to Ntfs: it works, yes.

But if you already have data on the Fat32 volume, or worse, the OS or the applications, converting to Ntfs won't create any access rights. This is really annoying, as protecting files and using a non-administrator session to surf on the Internet is a very important step for security - about as important as having an antivirus.

So if you want to convert to Ntfs, do it before writing sensitive files on it, especially the OS.