I'm having issues adding a hard drive to my Vista PC...it wants me to format the drive?!?

Question

I bought a new PC today that is running Vista. The primary hard drive on this PC is a SATA drive. There is an IDE input in the computer. I have an IDE drive that I want to install as a secondary slave drive for file storage. The drive already has data on it. I plugged it in and the system recognized the drive but it did not appear in my COMPUTER section as an available drive.

I went into Drive manager and attempted to initialize the drive and add a letter to it, but as soon as I did that it started formatting the drive!! I tried to make it stop but it wouldn't so I had to reboot.

Now the drive letter appears with my available drives but it still wants me to format the drive! Am I confused? Does "format" not mean what I think? If I let it format the drive will my info still be there and will it read it like a normal drive?

On my last computer when I added the second drive it just appeared like magic and was easy to use. This is a real pain in the butt!!!!

Answer 1

if you format the drive, all the data on the drive will be completely erased. if the drive has the same file format like fat32, n etc...i forgot the other options, if its a slave drive that you don't boot from, it should be able just to read the drive and you should be able to drop files onto the drive and store them. pretty sure the problem is properly in your bios, trying to boot from the eide hard drive rather than the serial-ata. cancel any option to format the drive otherwise all data will be lost.

Answer 2

ya