USB IDE or SATA external hard drive.

A very popular way of backing up entire computers and saving massive amounts of home pictures and video's in a safe place is with the external hard drive.  These drives can also be used as your primary system drive (which gets a bit complicated however).  The trick is to configure them to work the way you want them to. 

There are basically two kinds of external hard drives - the 'pre-packaged' ones, and the ones you put together yourself with either a used or new drive and an 'enclosure'.  Both use a simple USB plug to access your computer.  They work equally well and the drive/enclosure route is usually the cheap way to go - especially if you have a couple of old hard drives in the drawer.

As a rule, the pre-packaged ones have already been configured and formatted and all you have to do is plug them in and look for a new drive in your Windows Explorer.  However, that is not always the case.

My son-in-law called me a couple days ago and said he was having trouble configuring a couple of new external drives - one a package and the other a drive/enclosure device.  Said he plugged them in and Windows found them and installed the driver for them, but they were no where to be found in 'My Computer' or `Windows Explorer'.   Well, I just happened to have a new 500 GB SATA drive and SATA enclosure in my closet so I decided to try it myself.  Sure enough, Windows found it and set up the driver - but that was it.  Seems like it needed things like initialization and partitioning and formatting - and doing this for an external is a whole different ball game than setting up an internal IDE drive.   Plus, the Windows help program leads you to a few dead ends before you figure out what is going on.

This is the drill:  First, go to All Programs>Administrative and select 'Computer Management'.  The screen below will open.  Click on Disk Management under Storage and you will see you current active hard drives on the right.  On the bottom right panel you will see the new drive with the note 'not initialized' below it.  Right click on it and choose initialize and you will see the 'online' and 'unallocated' notations below.  This is where I stumped my toe again and went looking for more help.

I found the instructions below someplace and they finally started bringing light to the end of the tunnel.  I had seen the term 'New Simple Volume' someplace, so all I had to do was re-find it and I was in business.

At last, I right clicked the box next to the Disk 2 entry at the bottom - and there it was!!!  I did the new simple volume thing (which I now know is a partition) and then a quick NTFS format - and I was in business (see below).  AS COMMON A PRACTICE AS THIS IS I CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHY MICROSOFT MADE IT SUCH A MYSTERY!