New second HDD not assigned letter (600x)

[kado]

I got a 80gig Seagate HDD, and an UnltraSlimBay adapter for it. After bootup the drive is not assigned a letter. The drive is not listed in the device manager. The ever present floppy disk icon is there (My Computer - whether it's actually plugged in or not - if I actually plug it in, I have to access it as b). I right clicked on properties of the floppy drive icon, then clicked the hardware tab, and the model # of the new drive is listed there (along with the the other HDD), and it says the device is working properly. So the system sort of sees it. I need the drive letter to format it...

[rkawakami]

What Windows operating system are you running? I'm currently doing this in Windows XP for a couple of new Seagate 40GB drives. You do this by accessing the Disk Management function from here:

Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management

or an alternate method:

Right click the "My Computer" icon on your desktop and select Manage, then Disk Management

Your Ultraslimbay hard drive should be "seen" by the Disk Management tool as Disk 1. Assuming that you have a blank drive or are willing to lose all of the information on that drive, right-click in the area represented by the disk map (under the black bar and where it says "Unallocated"), choose New Partition. Click Next in the New Partition Wizard opening screen, Next again for a primary partition, adjust the size of the partition (if needed) then click Next again, and then you come to where you assign the drive letter. Select whatever letter you want, then click Next. You are then prompted to format the drive as NTFS and do a full format (as opposed to a quick one). Click Next and then the Finish button to begin formatted the drive. After all of this, your drive should become available to Windows.