Please help, I recently installed a new slave drive. Set-up sees the drive and the device mager says the drive is working properl.. However I cannot "see" the drive in windows explorer. I've run the mmc command nd the drive shows that it is "unallocated". I assume that means it has no drive letter? How do I "allocate" this new drive? Thanks for any help you can provide. REM

Have you Formatted the slave drive?

i have not, not sure how to do that since i can't see the drive from the command prompt or explorer

Btw Oo Rah!!

Semper Fi.... Make the slave drive the Master, boot from the XP cd or a bootable floppy, create a partition and format in NTFS. Then switch the drive back to slave. If you are unsure how to do that let me know!
Follow step 3 if unsure: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic53502.html

30 year Air Force here, no A: drive in this dell, have to dig up XP cd not confident about sawpping master to slave and back, etc

It would be far far easier to right click on your "my computer", select manage, then storage, then diskmanagement. Then right click on the unallocated drive on the right hand side then select format.

It saves changing the jumper and cable positions for the new hard drive.

Congrats on AF hope you are happily retired. Just unplug the IDE cable (largest one) from the Master, Set the jumper on the rear of the Slave drive to Master Plug it into the cable you removed from the Master (it only goes one way), plug in the power connector. Boot the computer from the XP cd (when u find it) and follow step 3 in this thread: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic53502.html
Then unplug the slave, set the jumper back to slave, plug the IDE cable and Power Connector back into it, replace the IDE cable on the original Master reboot without the CD and when everything works close up the computer and your off and running.

But will it show up in Disk Management if it is unpartitioned?

Yes!!!!!! Thats why its called disk management, its for managing disks!!!!!

rik - when i go to disk management the disk show unallocated but when i right click all i get is "properties" and "help" i do not get an option to format the disk, i am the admin on this machine

oh oh, tried it again and i think it is actually working, we will see thanks for all the help - i'll let you know if it works.. REM

SUCCESS!!!! thanks for the help from both of you, i'd still be scratching my head if it weren't for your help. REM

No problem, anytime!!!!!!!

Yes thanks rik, learn something new everyday!!!!!