Format new esata drive

[Triple Nickle]

Hello,
I have an esata dock and it works fine with my existing formatted sata drives. I purchased a new sata drive and plugged it in the docking station to format the drive and windows 7 cannot see it. I can take it out of the docking station and plug one of my old sata drives in and windows see's it immediately. How do I get the new one to be seen and format it?

 

[Paperdoc]

Any brand new empty HDD needs two steps of preparation before an OS can use it. They are to Create a Partition on that drive, and then to Format that Partition. On current OS's, these two usually are combined into one process called Initializing the Drive.

For details, read WyomingKnott's Sticky at the top of the Storage ... General Discussion Forum here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265764-32-guide-installed-disk-system

Pay particular attention to his Step 5. You use a Windows tool called Disk Management to do this.