Need to format a hard drive or add a new, factory fresh hard drive to your Windows XP PC? Our video guide will show you how

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to format a hard drive and the other steps you need to take when you add a fresh new hard drive to your Windows XP PC. Before you can write any data to the drive, or before it even shows up in My Computer, you will need to follow the steps shown in the video.

Windows Vista users - If you surfed onto this page looking for a tutorial on how to format a hard drive in your operating system, click here.

Please allow for a short delay while the video loads. When loading is complete, press the play button to start the video.

Additional notes

If you are preparing this hard drive for use as an offsite backup, as per our Off-Site Backup Case Study, you may want to add two partitions to the drive if you feel confident doing so. This will stop one user going over his or her quota of disk space.