Hello Mick,

With the assembled drive and case attached via a USB port, from the Start
Menu or Control Panel go to Administrative Tools / Computer Management. Then
under Storage click on Disk Management. When the window is populated with
the drive information, right click on the external drive and you'll be
presented a menu with options. As I recall, for a new drive you will first
create a partition, then when you right click the drive you can format it.

Involving more work, and time consuming, would be installing the drive as a
second drive (slave) and prepare it using the Hitachi software. The
recommended method is to use Windows XP.

Sven Swanson, Sr.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mick Fitzpatrick" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 16, 2004 6:28 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] USB2 hard drive case


Hello

I have purchased a 2.5" external USB2 HDD case. Seperately I've bought a
Hitachi 20g HDD.

The drive has not yet been Fdisk'd or fomatted and therefore the drive has
not yet been allocated a drive letter and not usable. Is it possble to do
'within' Windows XP?

If not what is the most straight forward method to apply fdisk and format it
(via the US port)
ready for use?

I hope I've made myself clear

TIA ... Mick

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