Need to format a hard drive or add a new, factory fresh hard drive to your Windows Vista or Windows 7 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 Vista or Windows 7 PC. Before you can write any data to the drive, or before it even shows up on your PC, you will need to follow the steps shown in the video.

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

Windows 7 users - Although this video was recorded using Windows Vista, the process is virtually identical in your operating system.

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.