The instruction is applicable to connecting a new, not yet used disk, on which there is no information and partitions.
After the disk is physically connected, you need to initialize it and create a partition (s) on it. Until then, it will not be available for use and will not be displayed among other drives.
Press Win + R, enter diskmgmt.msc. In the Disk Management window, the new disk should look something like this:
1. Performing initialization
In the context menu " Disk 1" select "Initialize disk". In the window that appears, you will need to select a partitioning style, MBR or GPT.
Choosing a Markup Style
• If you select MBR and Windows will be installed on the disk in the future, then the Legacy mode must be enabled in the BIOS of the computer - this is the classic version of the BIOS and in old motherboards there is only it. In the new ones, there is a choice - UEFI or Legacy, and if UEFI mode is enabled, Windows during installation will declare that the disk with the MBR partitioning style does not suit it.
• If you choose GPT, everything will work in the same way, if you need to install Windows on it, you will have to & nbsp; switch BIOS to UEFI mode.
As a rule, there is also a third mode, universal, which is usually enabled by default - UEFI and Legacy (can also be called CSM Support). In this case, if there is an MBR boot loader on the boot device, then the boot will go in Legacy mode, if the EFI boot loader is in UEFI mode. If, for example, this is an installation flash drive with Windows and an MBR loader on it, then Windows during the installation process will ask for a disk with the MBR partitioning style, and with an EFI loader - a GPT disk, respectively.
If both types of boot loader are installed on the boot device, EFI will take precedence. Therefore, to force boot from the bootloader MBR, you need to enable the Legacy only mode.
Advantages of UEFI mode over Legacy
• Faster loading of the BIOS itself
• You can create no more than 4 main partitions on an MBR disk, and each can be no more than 2 terabytes. GPT partitioning allows you to create an almost unlimited number of partitions, of an almost unlimited size.
There is no difference in work, GPT and MBR disks do not.
Third-party applications can convert a disc from one type to another. Using Windows tools, this can be done with the diskpart utility, but only with the loss of all data on the disk.
2. Creating partitions
In the context menu of the unallocated area, select "Create Simple Volume".
At the next step of the wizard, select the size of the partition to be created. If we need only one partition on the disk, click next, by default the entire disk volume is set there. If you need two or more partitions, set the desired size for the first. In the example, we will create two volumes, so we cut off about half of the total size.
Next, we assign a letter and a name to the disk (Volume label), everything else can be left by default.
After completing the wizard, the disk will be formatted, get a letter and appear in the system.
From the remaining, unallocated part of the disk, create a second volume in exactly the same way.
