Hard Drive help needed

OK, so I installed a new hard drive in my computer. Everything seemed to be working fine. My computer recognized it and it showed up in my computer as working. I however can not install anything to it. I am using Windows Vista Ultimate and it is a western Digital Caviar 320 GB. how do I choose to install a program on this hard drive instead of my other one?

Vista will not let you install anything to the root of the drive

you can disable UAC and/or take ownership of the drive through the security console

How would someone disable UAC and take control of the drive?

Maybe I should make this more clear, the drive shows up as available space, but when I go to install something it only shows the available space on my first hard drive as usable.

JH258 said:

Maybe I should make this more clear, the drive shows up as available space, but when I go to install something it only shows the available space on my first hard drive as usable.

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Okay 2 things.

You say it shows up as available space...

You mean it has a drive letter?

If not you need to go into disk management and format/assign drive letter.


If it already has a letter.. .easiest thing to do is open a window of the blank drive. right click and create folder.. (this you are allowed to do... all hte folders you want in root... just not files... stupid if its a storage drive.. but there you are.


Taking permission is complicated and I never remember it off the top of my head. Google "permissions in Vista" and it will probably let you know how.

Disabling UAC there are 3 or 4 methods. It can be done in control panel, msconfig, secpol.msc and straight reg hacking. You may want to disable notifications in security center too otherwise you are always going to have the red shield in hte systray telling you its turned off. This will eliminate Windows letting you know when you have other problems with security though.. .so its best to disable UAC get everything you want installed and then renable UAC, IMHO. the only problem with leaving UAC running is programs/games that still cache in program files rather then in documents and settings I found very few of these though.

Right click it in my computer and format it.

It's been formatted and has a letter. Just when I try to install a program it only shows that the amount of space available is what was on my original drive. I've actually formatted it several times trying to get it to work.

Thanks for the help guys, I got it figured out.

JH258 said:

Thanks for the help guys, I got it figured out.

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By doing....