Brand new pre-partitioned HDD will it be automatically assigned a drive letter once booted?

Quite a specific question - if I install a second brand new 2.5" NTFS pre-partitioned HDD in a Windows 8 laptop will it automatically mount and be assigned a drive letter once the machine has booted?

Cheers in advance for anyone who knows the answer.

 

I'd be surprised if it doesn't. I haven't tried this on a Windows 8 machine yet, but on Windows 7 (which 8 is based on) does the behavior you're talking about (at least in my experience). So long as the drive isn't corrupted or anything, it should work.

 

i second that it should it should so long as it's formatted and partitioned properly. how are you planning to format the drive in advance? because if windows doesn't auto-assign, you can just mount and assign a letter to the drive from diskmgmt.msc -- which is also one way to format/"pre-partition" new volumes of course.

 

Planning to partition and pre-format using another Windows 8 machine.

It will be going into a brand new Win 8 laptop that hasn't been booted and ideally I don't want to boot it and have to run through setup and then run disk management.

I want the machine to be in vanilla state and hopefully auto mount/assign.

Thanks for your thoughts which were the same as mine, just wasn't 100%.

 

Yes, the machine you install it to will auto-assign the first available drive letter(s) to the new/pre-formatted partition(s) when it first detects the drive. Just like if I were to take my optical drive (which is assigned to E: on my Alienware) and connect it to another machine with only a hard drive and nothing else. That Windows Disk Manager will assign it to D: even though it is assigned to E: on my Alienware. The LM registry of each machine is what saves the specified drive letter of a drive, not the drive itself.

You can always do what Mattcheau said, and reassign the drive letter in Windows Disk Management Console.