hello this is Christopher with Puget systems I'm creating this video to show you today how
to initialize and format a brand new hard drive the first thing you'll notice if you go to this
PC or wherever your drives usually show up I've got a new drive connected but it's not showing
up you actually see two drives you see a C Drive and a D Drive but you do not see the e here which
is or which would indicate the the new drive that I've plugged in it doesn't show up because windows
won't see it until you've formatted it and the way to do that is below so I'm going to close
that and I'm going to actually right-click here on the Start menu now again I'm right-clicking
I'm not left clicking and it brings up this wonderful special menu which has a bunch of
different options but today we're just going to deal with Disk Management so I'm going to
click on Disk Management here and it's going to populate now you'll notice right from the get-go
it's actually asking if you want to initialize the disk this drive is smaller than 2 terabytes
so we're going to go ahead and tell it yeah we want to initialize it and we also want to make it
a MBR the Master Boot Record the thing is if you have a drive that's larger than 2 terabytes you
want to actually switch to GPT in GPT it supports the larger drives but it doesn't work with a lot
of older versions of Windows so you kind of have a trade-off there MBR works with just about any
drive you want and workers are any version of Windows you want but it doesn't work with
larger drives so in this case we're smaller than 2 terabytes so we're going to go with MBR we're
going to click OK and it's actually going to start to initialize here when you look down here it's
actually I've expanded the window out a little bit so you can see the new drive it's this disk to
drive and you notice now it's listed as online if you don't have it initialized it won't be listed
as online and you'll see it's got an unallocated partition here and that's what that black line
indicates is that this is an unallocated partition and what you want to do is actually make a new
partition so the way to do that is actually to right-click it we're going to click on new simple
volume just kind of another word for partition there's slight differences but they mean pretty
much the same thing we're going to go ahead and click Next here and we're going to let it do its
default and we're going to let it default to the e Drive you could if you wanted to set it to mount
on to another folder I don't recommend that I could also change the drive letter if you want
to go with a different Drive letter again not something you usually need to do with something
to keep in mind we're going to go ahead and click Next we're going to get a few more options we're
going to ask the file system I recommend sticking with NTFS unless you have a particular reason to
go otherwise we're going to leave the default allocation unit size because that's perfectly
fine for what we're doing here and the volume label is going to go ahead and you can leave it at
new volume I like to just delete it you can name it whatever you want but I like to delete it and
finally we're going to leave this option here that says perform a quick format now you can choose to
do a long format but it takes a long long time and there's really not a whole lot of reason to do it
with a brand new Drive you're better off if you want to be sure of the reliability of the drive
you're better off finding out whoever makes the drive and what utility they recommend because they
usually have a for example Western Digital has their data Lifeguard diagnostic utility and that's
a better tool to test this with in any case we want to click up perform a clean we want perform
a quick format to be checked so we don't need to leave it alone we also do not want to enable
file or folder compression so I'm going to leave that alone as well and I'm going to go ahead and
click Next it's going to ask if I'm give me all kind of the details here to let me know what it's
going to do and I'm going to click finish it's going to immediately format the new disk and this
actually popped up before finished it's taking a little second here usually it doesn't pop up like
that there we go now it popped up and finishes and that's how you do it that's the entire step
to the new drive you'll notice if you go back to this PC you'll actually see this new Drive
now if you have any questions or anything you can contact us via support at puja systems calm
if you have a puget computer just have your order number ready or your name some way for us to look
up your records if you don't have a puget system I recommend using like Google just if you do a
search for initialize and format and you drive and usually you can find some information that
will be pretty detailed anyway I hope this has been helpful to you and I thank you for your time