I have attached a second Sata harddrive to my mainboard and vista cant seem to allocate the drive as it claims it is unreadable. I have tried this with 2 different new drives (both 1tb) and still can not allocate the drive.

I have downloaded the latest drivers for my gigabyte mainboard and i have gone into computer management to manage the disks but i get greyed out options. The most that i could do was set the drive to MBR.

I have attached a screen shot - please view.

Any assitance in this matter would be appreciated.

Would that not mean i have to format both drives?

My intention is to use the terribyte as a back up

Can't you just format the new unallocated drive from Disk Management? or is the back-up drive already formatted and with data that you don't want to loose? if so, was the drive possibly formatted with FT32 and not NTFS, hence, why Vista is having such an issue with it?

Ok i have it working now.
MrNeeds, your method nearly worked.
I think i will make it my duty to outline what i did before i got it working.

- At original install vista could not find my second 1 terribyte harddrive.
- I then installed windows XP on it, loaded vista and still no cigar. Harddrive was unallocated and unreadble.
- Then i gave MrNeeds approach. The drive was formatted, loaded vista and when to disk management. Had to reformat disk as it was still unreadable. I did full format. There were format errors right at the 98% ( What a waste of time that was). This resulted in larger errors. The disk could not be reformatted even via the reuse of MrNeeds methods.
- Now for the simple solution. I found a computer with windows XP on it, installed the drive and did a quick format through windows XP. after not even 5 minutes of formatting, plugged it back into Vista low and behold it works.

Wow - i cannot count how much time had been wasted on such a simple task.
Managed to find a new error though - will post in another thread...