Title: Installing a 2nd Hard Drive Guide

Author: Matt Charlton matt@drivezone.com

Printed from driverzone.com http://www.driverzone.com

 

With hard drive prices decreasing and storage space increasing almost everyday, now is a great time to purchase a second hard drive to increase your storage capacity.

Introduction:

Okay, so you’ve just gone and bought a new 30gb hard disk to go with your 6gb hard disk you’ve had for 3 years. You need to know how to install it, which is why you’re reading this guide right now.

There are thee different parts to a hard disk installation. You need to physically install the disk, tell the computer it has a new hard disk and finally configure the disk to work with your operating system. All of these points will be covered in detail.

Setting the jumpers:

Okay, so you need to get inside your PC, unscrew the screws that are holding the thing together. These are normally found around the edges of the back of the case. The number of screws can range from 2 to 6 screws, and all of them need to be out to gain access to your base unit.

Once inside, you will see a heap of cables and a lot of circuit boards, now don’t be scared, you can do this!

Right, we need to prepare the hard disk. Take it out of any packaging it may have, and look carefully at the label on top. There should be a section on this label concerning jumper settings, these are very important. If you are installing the new hard disk and removing the old one, you can ignore this setting. However, if you are adding the new hard disk to the existing one, you need to change the jumper settings to slave. The jumper is a small piece of plastic with 2 metal contacts inside to connect two pins together. It is usually located next to the IDE and power cable connectors on one side of the hard disk. It will be set to Master as default, you need to look at the label on the top side of the hard disk and find out where you need to place the jumper to set it to slave mode.

IDE Channels:

Okay, lets talk IDE channels. This is where it can get a little complicated. There is a ribbon cable plugged into the back of your original hard disk. There should be one other connector on the cable, this may already be connected to your CD Rom drive/DVD drive or CD Writer. If not, just plug in the spare ide connector and away we go. Move onto section 2.

Okay, so, if you’ve got a CD Rom drive/DVD drive or CD Writer, we need to utilise the other IDE connector on the motherboard. You should have had another IDE cable supplied with your CD rom drive. This will plug in on the motherboard directly above/below where your first IDE cable is located. It will only go in one way, so be careful as there are pins involved that if broken will render your computer useless. Once connected, we need to decide where we want to put things.

For CD rom drives, I would place the CD rom drive on the second IDE channel (set as master) and the extra hard disk set as slave (see above) on the first IDE channel. I will write another guide about choosing the best IDE channels for your peripherals later.

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.