OK so I bought a new HDD to use as an external data store. But it gets
recognised only as far as being a Hitachi, and that's after my
spending an hour going through a tree of panels and affirmations. How
do I get it properly recognised in My Computer (which thus far it is
not) and formatted so I can use it? Is it something to do with the
jumpers (I have tried every combination recognised in teh diagrams)?

Right click My computet> manage > disk management > you must see the assigned letters for your HDD .

<jack.j.jepper@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6dce900c-7ba7-4619-91b9-367ccc3afdb1@xxxxxx

> OK so I bought a new HDD to use as an external data store. But it gets
> recognised only as far as being a Hitachi, and that's after my
> spending an hour going through a tree of panels and affirmations. How
> do I get it properly recognised in My Computer (which thus far it is
> not) and formatted so I can use it? Is it something to do with the
> jumpers (I have tried every combination recognised in teh diagrams)?

Hi,
New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must
first initialize it.
If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard
appears so
you can initialize the disk.

Right click on Computer icon, pick Manager in this click Disk Management,
on the right you will see all your drivers find the new one in botton
screen.

In Disk Management, right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then
click Initialize Disk.

In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize. You can
select whether to use
the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

Use the MBR, also I find it better not to format the drive in Disk
Management
when you have Initialize the Disk it will show up in Explore, format the
disk in there
you can use quick format to do it......