How to Erase/Format/Wipe a New or Old Hard Drive in Windows XP

This is a tutorial on formatting a hard drive, or enabling a new one.

Directions:
How to Format/Erase a Hard Drive
(For hard drives that are operational and not currently running Windows XP)
First, you should check your current hard drives, navigate to My Computer


As you can see, I have two active hard drives right now, My local disk, which is running Windows XP, and my MainStorage, where I put my video and music.


However, I just added one to make three total hard drives... now I need to enable and format it. (You don't need to format, but chances are your salvaging an old hard drive anyway)
Lets start...
Follow this path:
1. Start
2. Right Click My Computer
3. Select Manage
4. On the left side, click storage
5. Select Disk Management under storage

This will now show the hard drives in use currently at the top (Mine says C: and MainStorage)
The bottom portion lists all the drives plugged in to the computer, notice I have four (Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2, and CD-ROM Drive


Disk 0 and 2 are the drives I'm using now, Disk 1 is the new hard drive I just plugged in. (It should say unallocated, but if you want to format a drive in use, it will say healthy)

For people with unallocated drives:
1. Right click unallocated drive
2. Select "New Partition"
3. Hit "Next" 3 times w/out changing anything
4. Choose the letter drive you want (doesn't matter)
5. Hit Next
6. Check "Format this partition"
7. Put File System at NTFS
8. Put Allocation Unit Size at Default
9. Put the name of the drive you want (i.e. Storage) under Volume Label
10. Don't check compress or quick format
11. Hit Next, then Finish
12. The drive is now formatting!! (takes a loong time)
For People with "Healthy Drives":
1. Right click healthy drive (MAKE SURE IT IS NOT THE DRIVE YOU ARE RUNNING YOUR OS IN!!)
2. Select Format
3. Put File System at NTFS
4. Put Allocation Unit Size at Default
5. Put the name of the drive you want (i.e. Storage) under Volume Label
6. Hit OK
7. Drive is formatting!!!


Thank you! I'll be happy to help to the best of my ability!