In this guide, we will demonstrate the process of mounting an additional hard drive in Windows. Although the demonstration takes place in Windows Server 2012, it’s worth noting that the procedure is essentially identical for Windows Server 2008.
To begin, initiate the process by right-clicking on the Start button to open a menu:
We need to choose “Disk Management” to access the Disk Management service. If Windows detects a new hard drive, a pop-up menu will appear:
For volumes under 2 TB, we opt for MBR, and for larger disks, we choose GPT. Since the capacity of the hard drive in our example is only 100 GB, we’ll select MBR here. Clicking OK will write the chosen partition table to the hard disk. Following this procedure, we will be redirected to the main menu of the Disk Management service. Alternatively, one can access this overview through Control Panel => Computer Management.
As observed, our new hard drive is identified as Disk 1. However, before utilizing it for data storage, we must partition and format it. To do so, right-click on the rectangle adjacent to the box labeled Disk 1, and select “New Simple Volume.”
A wizard will appear, and it is fairly self-explanatory. You can’t go wrong with the pre-selected and suggested values. By default, the wizard allocates the entire disk capacity for the new partition and formats it with the NTFS file system, which is recommended for Windows. While you have the option to modify these settings, in our example, we will proceed with the default configurations.
Our new partition is named STORAGE, but feel free to choose any name you prefer.
After completing the wizard, the new hard drive is ready for use and will be visible in Explorer:
