Internal hard drive installation instructions for Windows Vista using Vista installation process or Disk Management.
It is recommended you use Windows Vista to format and partition your hard disk drive when installing Vista on a boot drive or adding a drive as additional storage.
DiscWizard is your best choice if you want your new drive to become the new boot drive. To do that, the operating system and the files on the old boot drive need to be copied to the new drive.
The following are step-by-step installation instructions on how to format and partition a drive in Windows Vista.
Fresh Vista Install:
- Physically install the hard drive in your computer. If this is a PATA / IDE drive, set the BIOS to Auto-Detect the hard disk. If this is a SATA drive, on some systems you may need to enable the SATA port in the BIOS before the computer recognizes the drive. For further information on navigating your system’s BIOS, please consult with your computer manufacturer’s documentation.
- Insert the Windows Vista CD-ROM and restart the computer.
- Follow on-screen prompts for setup. When installing Vista fresh on this hard drive, at the screen titled, “Which type of installation do you want?”, click Custom (advanced).
- At the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen, select Disk 0 Unallocated Space and click Next.
- If this is a SATA drive and it is not recognized in the above step, you may need to install drivers provided by the motherboard manufacturer if the drive is connected directly to the motherboard, or install drivers provided by the controller card manufacturer if the drive is connected directly to a SATA PCI controller card. To install the driver for the SATA controller on the motherboard or PCI controller card, you will need to click Load Driver.
Note: there are no Vista drivers provided by Seagate for any Seagate or Maxtor branded PATA or SATA drive, as the drives themselves are all Plug-and-Play within Windows Vista when connected internally on your computer. - From here, proceed with the rest of the Vista installation.
Installing an Additional Data Drive in Windows Vista:
Note:If the second drive is pre-formatted or used in another Windows system, it is not necessary to re-format the drive. Follow the instructions below up to Step 2 and Vista should recognize the drive.
- Physically install the hard drive in your computer. If this is a PATA / IDE drive, set the BIOS to Auto-Detect the hard disk. If this is a SATA drive, on some systems you may need to enable the SATA port in the BIOS before the computer recognizes the drive. For further information on navigating your system’s BIOS, please consult with your computer manufacturer’s documentation.
- Restart the computer and boot into Windows Vista.
- Click on the Start button and select Control Panel. In the Control Panel, click on System and Maintenance. Scroll down and click on Administrative Tools. Double-click on Computer Management. On the left-hand side of the Computer Management window, click on Disk Management, located in the Storage section.
- In Disk Management you will see the active hard disks. Be patient, as it may take a minute or two for it to load the disk information. On the bottom half, you will see Disk 0, which is the Primary (or C:) drive. Disk 1 and greater are generally considered secondary storage drives.
- If the description of Disk 1 is “Not Initialized” then you must right-click on the Disk 1 icon and select Initialize.
- In the window that appears, click on the disk to be initialized and click on OK.
- Next, right-click on the Unallocated region of the basic disk, and select New Simple Volume.
- In the New Partition Wizard, click Next. Select the type of partition you want and follow all on-screen instructions. After finishing, the section of the disk that said “Unallocated” should say “Formatting” for a few seconds. Once it is finished formatting, it will say, “Healthy”.