How to Work With External Enclosures in Vista

There are two main types of hard drives: parallel ATA (P-ATA), and the newer Serial ATA (SATA), which largely replaced the P-ATA drives in new systems since the beginning of 2007. A SATA hard drive in an external enclosure is called an external enclosure SATA or eSATA. Initializing and formatting eSATA drives in external enclosures using Vista is easy.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Initialize, Format and Work With External Enclosures Using Classic View in Vista Control Panel

1. Plug the external enclosure drive into your computer.

2. Click "Start" and select "Control Panel."

3. Double-click the "Administrative Tools" icon.

4. Double-click the "Computer Management" icon.

5. 

   Left-click on the "Disk Management" icon (only once). All mounted drives on your computer, including the new, one will appear in the middle pane. In the bottom part of the middle frame, the new drive will show up as "unallocated" space.

6. 

   Right-click on the new drive's unallocated volume. Then, initialize and format it by selecting "New Simple Volume."

7. 

   Follow the on-screen prompts on the New Simple Volume Wizard dialog. During this process, you can select a drive letter or accept the system's default selection. Windows Vista will format your drive into a single partition using the NTFS file system.

8. 

   Right-click on your newly formatted hard drive where it says "New Volume," and create additional partitions by selecting "Shrink Volume," if desired. By default, Shrink Volume will split your hard drive into two equal partitions unless you enter a different number in the "Enter the Amount of Space to Shrink in MB" field. The new volume then becomes unallocated space that you will have to initialize and format by following steps 6 and 7 above.

Initialize, Format and Work With External Enclosures Using Standard View in Control Panel

9. Click "Start" and then choose "Control Panel" after plugging the external drive into your computer.

10. 

    Click the "System and Maintenance" link.

11. Click the "Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions" link under "Administrative Tools."

12. Initialize and format the drive using the instructions from steps 6 through 8 of the previous section.

Tips & Warnings

• Click "Start" and type "computer management" in the search field at the bottom of the window. Then, click the "Computer Management" link to get to the Computer Management screen quicker. Choose the "Quick Format" option when formatting a new hard drive, because modern hard drives very seldom have bad sectors and you can always run chkdsk /r from the command prompt afterward. The only time the Standard Format option is best is if you're using an older hard drive that may have bad sectors with Read/Write problems, so the operating system can skip those and put a record of what sectors are "bad" and should be avoided. Change the enclosure your external hard drive is in if you're having trouble working with it. Many times, when Vista doesn't recognize the drive or has other issues with it, the problem is the enclosure rather than the hard drive itself.
• If you use the Shrink Volume option to split your hard drive off into partitions then change your mind, the only way to combine partitions again will be to delete volumes, which will erase any data you have on them. You'll then have to initialize the combined partitions again using "New Simple Volume."

References

• Change in the behavior of the format command in Windows Vista by Microsoft Help and Support
• How to Install an External Hard Drive
• PCMech Forum