Am I a n00b?

So... I had been planning to upgrade the hard drives in my computer for some time now.  I had decided on getting the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive.  I headed to Fry's with a few of my friends and made the purchase.  I was super pumped to get back to my apartment and swap that sucker in for the 3 80gb drives I had clogging up space in my drive rack.  After putting the drive in I booted up and went to check the disk.  I clicked around, refreshed the page, and did everything else I could think of to see it... still nothing.  I ran some searches through Google but came up empty on why my drive was not working.  So, I called Fry's and ran back in there the next day.  When I get there I go to the customer service rep and tell them that my drive isn't working... naturally he connects it to their computer and tells me that it does indeed work.  I asked him what he did and he told me that he had to enable it.  He asked if I knew anything about computers, which made me feel inferior, then asked me if I knew anything about the disk utilities.  I answered of course while feeling like an idiot.  Needless to say I made a trip to Fry's for nothing, and went back home to enable the disk and begin to move files.  Now I have all my music and videos on one hard drive for easy transfer.  So for all of you who can't get your raw disk to work straight out of the box and never new why and may have RMA'd it... here you go.  I guess you learn something new everyday, or at least on some days.