How to add External Drive

I got a new external drive for my laptop this weekend. I just connected the drive to the laptop using the USB port and windows XP recognized the seagate external hard drive. This was good to observe. However after that I was not able to view any new drive created. I wonder how would I transfer my data onto the disk now. I spent sometime over it and managed to do that. I thought it would be useful for other folks to avoid spending that extra time. So I thought of listing down the steps required. Here you go..

Once you see that the drive is identified by the OS, and you can see icon in your system tray which says external device selected,

• GO to My Computer
• Right click on My Computer
• Go to Manage Tab
• Go to disk management
• You can now see the added external disk partition available witout anything.
• Just right click inside that partition space and say "mount".
• This will change the status for the external disk to "basic" and "online".
• Then once you have mounted the drive, again right click and say format.
• Once you format the drive it will ask you for the drive letter and once the formatting is done your drive would be visible for use.

Enjoy more space