I have just had a new HDD installed by a friend who knows what he is doing.
Having gotten back home My Computer did not show the new drive. By phone I was able to pick my friend's brains and initialise the disk, however My Computer still cannot see the new HDD, even after a restart. And it is quite some time since my friend has installed a new drive. If he was here he would likely be able to say do this or do that, but via the phone it is harder.
I was expecting to be able to format it, which will be time consuming as it is a 2TB drive. Obviously there is another step yet to be taken before I can do this.
So what is the next step in enabling My Computer to see the new drive?
For the record I am using XP Home, and I am a member of the Administrator group, I don't think the computer would have allowed me to initialise the drive otherwise, but I may be wrong.

Gosh, this is the second time I have answered my own post, will they make me a mod soon?
By going in via Disk Management, right clicking the drive in question and choosing New Partition, I am now formatting the drive (new partition) in NFTS.
I presume once that is done, and with a restart, that My Computer will then work as advertised.
Will post results ... in about 6 hours.

Yep, drives and partitions need to be formatted in order to be used.

Thanks for the follow up and good luck.

Hi Digerati,
Yep I knew it had to be formatted, it was figuring out how that was a stumbling block. When I asked the question "formatting" in the help area, it more of less explained what I wanted, though nothing about partitions was mentioned. Had a bad experience with Partition Magic once, and swore off partitioning drives after that, and the very word still makes me momentarily nervous.
It finished formatting about an hour ago, almost 7 hours, which was kind of what I anticipated. Now all that magnetic media just waiting for data. Yippee!

Well, there still has to be at least one partition on every drive - even if the partition takes up the whole drive.

Yes indeed it does.
The horror I experienced was with two partitions, that could not see each other, on one (C) drive. The idea was to be able to run Win 98 and XP on each partition, as the computer in question (some its peripherals to be precise) was not fully compatible with XP. It was a nightmare I never want to be repeated. And that is why the word "partition" still sends a chill down the spine.
This is a different partition we are talking about here, but just for a moment ...
Thanks for your help, as ever DAL is the place to go when baffled.
Have a good one

You too.