| Bios Settings: Okay, so now you’ve physically connected your drive, its time to
tell the bios that we have a new hard disk. You need to enter the bios (basic input output
setup) when you boot up your computer, this is usually done by pressing del, F1 or F2 when
prompted, around the time when the system is checking RAM.
Once in, you will be greeted with the familiar blue screen.
Most motherboards have an IDE autodetection option, you need to select this by using the
arrow keys and selecting with the enter key.
Then you need to select autodetect and select your drive as
and when it finds it.
Then, save settings and exit the bios.
Preparing the disk for use:
Okay, now to configure the hard disk. The easiest way to do
this is to use FDISK (fixed disk utility) You need to drop into dos mode for this, once
there, type FDISK and press enter.
You will have a menu. At the top of the menu, it will say
current fixed disk 1 or something, you need to change to fixed disk 2 – just select
change disk and select your new drive (should be fixed disk 2). Now, just to double check,
we need to select display partition information, there should be nothing there. If there
are partitions defined, you have selected the wrong hard disk.
Now, you need to make a new primary dos partition, select
this option from the menu, it will ask if you want to make it the maximum size available,
select yes.
It will do a few things and then inform you that you must
restart your computer, do this now and drop into dos again. It should have set your new
hard disk to drive D:. To check this, type d: and then Dir. It should say invalid media
type. Press cancel and type
Format d:
This can take anything up an hour, so be patient. Once done
it will ask for a volume label, you don’t have to give it one. Once this has done,
restart your computer.
Congratulations, you have successfully installed your new
hard disk drive.
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