I just tried adding a new 160 Gb external hard drive to my system at home. It was attached to my laptop using the USB bus. I am using XP Pro. I've also tried the drive on a PC with XP Home without success. The drive is appearing at the bios level OK, but the XP OS doesn't want to recognize it. It showed up one time initially in Disk Management, and XP told me I couldn't use the drive until I initialized it, which I did, but I don't think it finished initializing. It just froze in the middle of it. After rebooting, XP won't even show a raw disk for this drive. I tried removing it from the external case and putting it into a desktop PC, but that didn't help either. Is there any way to manually format or initialize a HDD in XP? Help!!!

you need to partition it with partitionmagic or in the windows xp cd

Thanks. I'll try that.

One question though. Do all brand new drives have to be initialized that way, or does XP normally take care of this if things go right? I guess the question is, does Disk Manager normally have the capability to partition a brand new unused drive with no initial partitions on it, or do I always have to 'manually' provide an initial partition on the drive before XP's Disk Manager will be able to manage the drive?

I think all drives have to be manually partitioned by the user at some point, so yes. The computer can't automatically partition your drive as it doesn't know how many virtual drives you want or what format they are going to be, these functions are always OS and user defined.