 So guys, this is a guide that I was inspired to make because one of my friends bought a stand-alone hard drive and then an enclosure for it. And unlike the pre-done external hard drives, like the ones from WD that look like this over here, unlike those, these drives, when you buy a bare drive, it doesn't necessarily come formatted. So rather than walk him through it on the phone, I decided to just make a video about how to initialize a brand new drive on your computer once you've plugged it in. So I've taken a bare drive here, and yes, that is not the most static safe way to do this, but I've done it. So I've plugged it in via SATA power and SATA data, and I'm powering it up with this power supply that's jumpered, totally ghetto setup, but whatever. And I'm going to show you guys the steps that are required in order to get your new hard drive recognized by your computer. So the first thing you're going to do is go to my computer, and that will be on your desktop if you're running Windows XP, and you're going to go to properties. Then you're going to go to the device manager and scan for hardware changes. So when you scan for hardware changes, I've already done this, but it'll bring up your hardware changes. So in this case, we're running a Seagate 2TB ATA device. Okay, so that's done. The next thing you have to do is right click on computer and click on manage. So when you manage the computer, you want to go to the disk management in particular, and you're going to then see, aha, this message. Now, if this message doesn't show up, then you're going to want to scan down, down, down until you find a not initialized drive. You right click on the unallocated space, or rather you right click on the not initialized drive, and you click initialize disk. Select disk. Okay, master boot record is correct, so okay. It takes just a moment to initialize the disk, but you're going to see that in my computer, that 2TB drive is still not showing up. So what I have to do now is I take that unallocated space and I create a new simple volume. Next, I want all of it. I'm going to assign the drive letter X for extreme. And then I don't want a label because a label is annoying. And next, finish. So that will take just a moment to format, and then the computer will detect the drive, local disk X, 2TB, and we are done. And now, now that I've initialized the disk and formatted it, remember these come initialized and formatted, so this only applies to a bare disk, I can actually unplug it, which I'm going to do. Okay, so I've unplugged it. Now if I refresh this, it goes away, eventually. Hold on. I can make it go away. Device manager, action, scan for hardware changes. Hmm. Okay, well then. Either way, I just showed you how to initialize and format your new drive. Aha, there it disappeared. Okay, we're good, we're good. So it disappeared now. And then when I take it and I plug it back in, you don't have to watch this part, it's okay. It will not need me to perform this process again. Now this applies for USB drives, Firewire drives, eSATA drives, internal SATA drives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Although US drives are automatically plug and play, so you won't need to do that device manager bit. There you go. It's here. It's ready to go. Thank you for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, tutorials, and other computer videos.