David Risley is the founder of PCMech.com. He is the brains, the thinker, the writer, the nerd.Introduction
Welcome to PCMech! If you run into any trouble following this guide or installing your hard drive, feel free to join our forums at http://forum.pcmech.com and ask for help, someone will be glad to help. For continued tips, tricks, and updates on our content, you might also consider signing up for our newsletter by entering your email address into the textbox to the right. We are here to help!
Before Installation
Installing a hard drive is a medium level job. If you are confident in yourself and would like to save the money a computer guy would charge to do it, go ahead and do it yourself. It won’t be that bad. The physical installation is actually pretty easy. Getting it ready for use takes a little longer.
The worst part about installing hard drives is setting the jumpers on the drive so that it works correctly with your current hardware. You only need to worry about jumpers if you are using an IDE hard drive. IDE hard drives have settings for master, slave and cable select. This is because, for an IDE drive, it matters. For Serial ATA drives (SATA), you don’t need to worry about jumpers at all. Now that SATA is becoming much more prevalent than IDE, it is becoming a lot less likely that you will need to worry about jumpers during this process.
Before installation, inspect the inside of the computer’s case and determine where you want the drive to go. If you are using an IDE hard drive, you want to optimally connect the drive on a different IDE channel than your DVD/CD drives. Most motherboards have two IDE channel connectors. So you would put your disc drives on IDE2 and your hard drives on IDE1. For SATA drives, your life, again, got easier. SATA gets it’s own channel and, as of this date, SATA DVD drives are very uncommon.
Materials Required
- Hard drive
- Copy of the hard drive manual (if you need to set jumpers; this can be downloaded if your drive didn’t come with one)
- Controller card (optional; use this if you don’t have a spare connector on the motherboard or space on an existing ribbon cable to connect your drive to. Make sure you get one that matches your drive - Serial ATA for an SATA drive; ATA/100 or ATA/133 for an IDE drive; SCSI for a SCSI drive.)
- Data cable for the drive (if you aren’t installing the drive as a slave on an existing cable)
- Power cable Y-splitter (if you don’t have a spare power connector)
- Ultimate Boot CD (if you want to clone your old hard drive to your new one)
How will you be using your new drive?
If you are replacing your primary hard drive, make sure you back up any data you want to save before you start. If you don’t want to reinstall Windows, you can clone the contents of your old hard drive to your new one using the setup utilities that hard drive manufacturers provide, or you can use a specific cloning program like HDClone or PC Inspector Clone Maxx. All of the above-mentioned utilities are available on the Ultimate Boot CD, so you can download and burn that and then choose the utility that is easiest for you to understand. (If you don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection, you can order a CD for a small fee.)
If you are willing to reinstall Windows, make sure you have discs for Windows and all your programs. This will prevent frustrations about losing programs after you have already formatted your computer.
If you are simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage, you don’t have to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you are installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive. If your current hard drive is set as “Cable Select” (meaning it is the only drive on the channel), then you may need to change it to “Master” which will allow you to add the second hard drive as a slave (see below).
Setting Jumpers: IDE Drives
IDE can accommodate two drives per channel, with most computers having two channels built in. The primary drive on a channel is called the Master, and the secondary one is called the Slave. The IDE channels are also labeled as Primary (or IDE1) and Secondary (or IDE2). The hard drive that the system boots from is usually the primary master. Generally, if you’re adding a second hard drive you would set it up as the primary slave. (The secondary master and slave are usually used for optical drives, although they can accommodate hard drives if needed.)
Most drives come set to be used as masters, so if you want to use one as a slave, you’ll have to change the jumpers, which are located between the power connector and the IDE connector. Each manufacturer has different jumper settings, so I can’t give you exact instructions here. However, there is often a diagram on the top of the drive telling you how to set the jumpers, and if not there will certainly be instructions in your hard drive’s manual (which you can download from the manufacturer’s website if your hard drive didn’t come with one).
Another jumper setting, which you can use if you have an 80-conductor ribbon cable, is Cable Select. 80-conductor cables can be identified by their much finer wires compared to 40-conductor cables and by their connector colors (the motherboard end will be blue, red, or green, and the drive connectors will be black for the one on the end and gray for the one on the middle). With both drives set to Cable Select, the computer will recognize the drive hooked up to the black end connector as the master and the one hooked up to the middle gray connector as the slave.
Setting Jumpers: SATA Drives
Good news! There are no jumpers to worry about on SATA drives. Some SATA drives do have a jumper which controls the speed of the SATA drive itself, but you do not need to worry about anything related to master, slave or cable select.
Physical Installation
Now’s when you actually take off the case and get your hands dirty. Let’s get started:
- Turn the computer off, unplug it, and take the case off. At this point, you may want to make some quick sketches of just how everything is in there: Which direction is everything facing? Where and how are the cables connected? For some people, such sketches help to put everything back when you are done.
- If you are replacing your old hard drive, remove the cables from the old drive. You will see both a ribbon cable and a small power plug. Do not force them out. The ribbon cable is usually quite easy to remove. Sometimes, though, the power connector can become stuck. Just rock it back and forth (lengthwise along the narrow side of the drive), taking care not to rip the connector off the drive. Then remove the mounting screws that hold the drive to the case frame. Sometimes, you may need to tip the case or get into some strange positions to reach all the screws; other times, the hard drive is mounted in a cage that you’ll be able to take out to get to the other side of the drives. Finally, remove the old drive from the case. Be sure not to bump anything too hard on the way out.
- If you are replacing the old drive, slide the new drive in right where the other one came out. If you are adding a second drive, just pick any empty drive bay - one a bit below the current drive might work best, because it will make it easier to route cables. If you are installing a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay, you may need to add rails or a mounting bracket to make it fit. Screw the drive into place, making sure the screws aren’t going in crooked. Don’t force them.
- If you need a separate controller card, install it now into any unused motherboard slot. Chances are that you don’t need to worry about this. It is usually only necessary if you want to add more IDE drives than your computer will support with it’s two built-in channels. If you are using SATA, your motherboard likely comes with enough SATA ports. If not, you can extend it using a controller card just the same way as with IDE.
- Attach the cables to the hard drive and to the motherboard or controller card if necessary. There are two cables: the ribbon cable (or SATA cable) and the power cable. The ribbon cable goes from the controller to the drive. Most cables are keyed to the connector so they only go in one way; if the cable isn’t going in, try flipping it over. Don’t force it. If you are adding a second drive, simply choose a connector on the same ribbon cable that is not used. Most IDE ribbon cables come with three connectors: one on the end (usually black) and one mid-way (usually gray), then one further away on the other end which connects to the motherboard (usually blue, green, or red). In general, the master drive should use the black connector on the end and the slave should use the gray connector in the middle, but if each drive is set either as master or slave, the position is not as important. On a SATA hard drive, position of the drives on the cable does not matter at all because a SATA cable only accomodates one drive.
- Plug the system in and turn it on. It is best to leave the case cover off for now in case you need to fiddle with something or troubleshoot the installation.
- If you did not use a controller card, enter the BIOS (usually by pressing the F1, F2, F10, F12, or Delete key when you see the Power-On Self-Test or the manufacturer logo). Check the BIOS to make sure that the drives are all being recognized. If you installed a drive on a connector that was not in use, you may have to set the corresponding drive to “Auto.” If your BIOS has an auto-detect feature, you can use that as well. If you did use a controller card, it will pop up a screen showing the name of the card and any drives it has detected.
- If the drives are not being recognized, check that both power and data cables are in tightly (including the motherboard end for the data cables), and that the jumpers are set correctly. If they are all recognized correctly, let’s move to the next section.
Software Installation/Cloning
Now that your new drive is installed, we can move on and get it set up with Windows. If you are replacing your current drive and cloning it to your new drive, you will need to connect both drives. Change any necessary jumpers (see “Setting Jumpers” above) so that both drives as well as a CD drive are recognized. At this stage it is not important to screw in your old drive; you can just rest it somewhere convenient, but don’t leave it hanging in midair. Boot from the Ultimate Boot CD, and select the utility you want to use to clone the drive. Go through the appropriate prompts, making sure to select your older drive as the source and your newer one as the destination (pay careful attention to the hard drive sizes indicated by the cloning program). You don’t want to clone your new drive with nothing on it to your old drive with all your data!
If you are replacing your current drive but not cloning its contents to the new drive, put your Windows CD in the drive and boot from it. You will be prompted during the first part of setup to partition and format your drive; if you are using Windows 2000, XP or Vista, make sure to use the NTFS file system.
If you are simply installing a secondary drive, boot into Windows. In Windows 2000/XP/Vista, your new drive will not appear at all in My Computer until you format it. In Windows 9x/ME, it will appear, but you will need to right-click on the new drive and choose “Format” from the menu. To format the drive in Windows 2000 or XP, right-click on My Computer and go to “Manage”. In the window that comes up, click Disk Management in the left pane. Once it loads, you should see an “Initialize Disk” wizard pop up. Partition and format the disk to your liking, but make sure not to convert it to a dynamic disk, as doing so will provide plenty of annoyances down the road.
Finished!
Congratulations, your new drive is installed! Now that you have installing your hard drive under your belt, you might be interested in partitioning your hard drive (that means dividing your space so you can separate data).
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Ryan said:
7/29/2007 1:33 pm
For a step by step installation procedure, it would be nice if it was written in plain english instead on computer geek. By the four sentence, you are assuming that everyone reading this will understand what ‘jumpers’ are. By the fifth sentence, ‘Serial ATA’. By the sixth you are talking about ‘SATA ports’ and ‘SATA drives. Although one would expect that people attempting this would be somewhat computer savy, these instructions are meant more for the individual who can explain why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk. It just oozes computer geekiness out of every orifice. D+
[Reply]
Joshcore said:
7/30/2007 7:54 pm
^
Ryan, this article is aimed at people who already know what jumpers are and the difference between SATA and IDE based hard drives, such as myself. You found this article on a website specialising in PC mechanics, aimed at it’s own users, who are already computer literate. They are not nerds, merely computer literate. If this article is too hard for you to understand, then perhaps you should look for another article somewhere else or wizen yourself up a little and come back for more.
It’s not that hard.
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Ryan said:
7/30/2007 10:19 pm
I don’t recall stating that it was too hard for myself to understand. What I did state was that it was intended more for individuals who were already computer savy. You could re-read my post or have someone read it to you.
It’s not that hard.
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Joshcore said:
7/31/2007 3:07 am
^ well if it’s not too hard for you to understand, why did you bother posting anything in the first place? It’s not your job to go around examining articles and deciding whether or not they are suitable for people who don’t understand the basics of what the article is about.
Having said that, this is a great article, A+. I think anyone who is attempting to install a new hard drive themselves should embrace the inner geek and get the job done properly… Not that something like this even requires to be a geek to understand, but, according to Ryan, it does.
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SkyPioneer reply on April 24, 2008 2:15 am:
This guide, though it may be accurate, is not newbie friendly. It uses jargon from start to finish, leaving someone who is new to computers dumbfounded. How would they know whether they have an IDE or SATA hard drive if they have never even heard of those abbreviations before? Some may argue that people like me who may find it easy to understand, why shouldn’t the newbies? Because of just that, they are NEWBIES. Someone who finds this page from Google who doesn’t the difference between a a computer and an X-Box would never know what on earth IDE or SATA is, let alone what it means.
Why does it matter? Its simple:
BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WHO DO KNOW WHAT IT MEANS WON’T NEED A GUIDE TO HELP THEM.
Therefore, the people who don’t know DO need a guide, but this guide is USELESS to them because THEY WON’T UNDERSTAND IT.
Joshcore, if you are blindly defending your precious website PC Mech, then please, at least have a decent reason to do so.
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E.Thornton said:
7/31/2007 9:20 am
Hi David Risley at pcmech
Have tried 3 times before to add an IDE hard drive, without success. Following your instructions, I have now successfully added a Samsung hard drive and Windows XP has recognised the primary slave.
Thanks for the easy to follow instructions.
Cheers
Ernie
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Joshcore said:
7/31/2007 11:04 pm
Well done, Ernie
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William said:
8/3/2007 6:08 pm
Hi Joshcore thanks for the advice,
I am aware i can place two hard drives in the one PC but do i have to installtwo operating systems if i want to run certain tasks on one hard drive and other tasks on the secondry hardrive i also need to use the second hard drive to recognise s piece of hardware is this ability pheasable ?
Ty.
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Rivers said:
8/4/2007 2:07 am
I installed a extra hard drive in my pc and would like to completely wipe all data from it. It had windows 2000 on it and i just want to save home movies on it. I formated the drive and then deleted the visible contents. It still has 2.79 GB of space used. How do i remove this data?
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Gary Hart said:
8/7/2007 4:46 am
Thanks guys! Solved all my problems putting my new S-ATA HDD in under Vista. Saved me a lot of ‘messing about’ time.
Keep up the good work
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Richard said:
8/10/2007 9:10 am
My 2nd EIDE (XP) drive installed with surprising ease — no BIOS or jumper changes (cable select). I only had to format the new drive. But having read this article in advance, I felt confident I could have overcome installation issues.
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JP said:
8/10/2007 5:06 pm
I’m trying to add a second SATA hard drive to my Dell. I’ve hooked up all the cables and turned the drive to “On” in the Setup Utility. But, when I try to boot to Windows I just get a black screen that says “No Boot Device Available. F1 to retry boot. F2 to enter Setup Utility.”
Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong?
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Elliot said:
8/11/2007 9:03 am
Thanks! Easy to understand! Even for a non-too compuer literate such as myself!
Cheers!
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LD said:
8/11/2007 5:11 pm
Hi, I had two hard drives installed on my computer. The second one was for storage. I got a bug in my computer and had to reinstall XP on it. It is up and running but now my computer does not recognize my second drive. As it is full of data and pictures I do not want to reformat it. How do I get my computer to recognize it. They were both installed with cable select with an 80 conductor ribbon cable. I have them reconnected this same way.
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tysun said:
8/12/2007 5:44 pm
I install a Sata WD drive into my w2k pc.
The bios detected the drive and reboot. The W2K also detected the new drive when I try check in the ‘device manager’.
However, there isn’t one WD SATA HD in the explorer. Is there anyway to solve this problem? thanks.
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Ravi said:
8/14/2007 8:38 pm
I need to install a Sata 160GB to my 3″ external drive,
The manual does not tell much about it so is there a way any 1 can help me. TX
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thenson said:
8/14/2007 9:51 pm
I was told that I fried my mother board from a local docal {dumb corner guy) 2nd hand computor store. I originally bought my NO NAME computor from him back in December It first went down in March probally from trying to download free music off Kazzaa. Then, after paying $70 bucks he restored it (with all files gone) he told me I had a virus and not to download free music anymore and always update my security and run it. Well, in June it went down again, this time I never downloaded anything and adult porn was out the question. It happen while I was surfing Digg, > off it went, and all I had was a black screen and a huge paper weight. As you can guess, I took it back to the docal and he said “you fried your mother board and a small fee ($170.00) he could restore my computor and re-install and operating system, when I asked what happed? he said I don’t know but you fried your set like a blackman handling chicken in a kitchen! ?!?!? So I asked could you save my lost data and I will spend more money with you and he said no?
So my question to the world is can I put the harddrive into another computor to restore lost files and possibally benifit from 1 computor - 2 hard drives.
angry in OHIO
[Reply]
Germ said:
8/16/2007 1:07 pm
I inherited my works old server computer and I want to convert it to a stand alone personal PC. The drive is a SCSI. Do I require any jumpers on these drives if I were to hook up 2 SCSI drives together? And/or can I use one SCSI drive and one EDI drive on this computer? (it does have the hook ups for both types of drives.
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Darklance said:
8/16/2007 3:05 pm
Thankyou for the info David.. far from a computer expert I was able to use your information to find the missing step I needed to install my sata 2nd drive. Finding the manager and getting it to format so I could see it on my computer was the missing step. I knew the new drive was there and installed correct as I could find it in bios as well as the hardware manager.
I did need to explore a little after using the wizard to find I had to right click on the new driver in the manager window to start the formating process and assign the drive a letter.
But thankyou for the time you put into posting this info.. Much needed.
[Reply]
Janine said:
8/16/2007 6:28 pm
Many thanks for the VERY SIMPLE step by step instructions for initializing a STA harddrive. Even I could understand it………… Once again, many thanks. xxx
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walter said:
8/17/2007 12:47 am
Hello, I’ve been tring to install a SATA hard drive with no luck. I am trying to replace my current hard drive and install WindowsXP on it. The Hard Drive only came with a CD, no floppy disk. So when I get to the prompt that ask to insert a disk in A:/ the only option I have is to insert the CD… I’ve tried to set my BIOS to read the CD-ROM 1st during the boot with no luck. Thanks for your time
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Mitch said:
8/17/2007 3:58 am
Thanks alot, THE BEST step by step tutorial that I have found. Clear and accurate, thanks heaps!
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Giga said:
8/19/2007 12:07 am
thenson,
the guy who told you your your computer was fried was probably a jerk and put the virus on himself.
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cher said:
8/21/2007 5:30 am
The instructions are great and have saved my sanity and hours of trying to start my computer in Dos when i do not have a floppy disk drive.
It is definitely useful for those comfortable fiddling with their computers.
Can i add that the wizard does not pop up automatically. You have to click the Action button. To use the new drive as a second drive, the primary partition option should still be selected, otherwise, Windows will not format the drive.
Thank you again.
Cher
[Reply]
Kieron said:
8/22/2007 11:25 am
How do I set up a slave hard drive in windows without formatting it as I have information on it. I have it hooked up and it is recognized in the bios but it does not show up in my computer.
thanks
[Reply]
Andy said:
8/23/2007 7:22 am
walter, you need to copy the drivers from the CD to a floppy and then use the floppy disk during installation
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Brian said:
8/24/2007 1:21 pm
Thenson,
Yes you can put the drive into another computer. Need to make sure the jumpers on the drive are set to ’slave’. If the hard drive is still OK then it should show up fine.
If the hard drive is ‘bad’ then it will take some nicer tech guy to perform TRUE data recovery and not just NEW hardware. Have done this many times for hard drives that have a ‘bad spot’ that didn’t allow it to be recognized on boot-up.
[Reply]
Bomberboy92 said:
8/25/2007 11:25 pm
Wow thanks this tutorial really helped me with my new drive.
[Reply]
Janna said:
8/27/2007 3:26 pm
I have a problem! I read your page on installing and cloning my hard drives. Well it sounded so simple but no matter what I do I cannot get the computer to recognize my old drive connected to the slave connecter on the cable. I’ve switched the jumpers, I’ve switched the drives, nothing will work.
[Reply]
tommy ellis said:
9/5/2007 6:26 am
Your instructions must only apply to desktops.
How about installing a new and different hard drive in a laptop?
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David said:
9/10/2007 12:58 pm
I must be missing a step.
I cloned my 90GB IDE onto a 250GB IDE using a bootable HD Cloning CD.
Everything appears to be ok except:
1. Setup shows the 250GB drive for device “0″
2. My computer - “C” drive properties still shows the 90GB
I am running XP. - Sytem came right up and looks OK
How do I get “My Computer” to recognize the 250 GB.
[Reply]
Tyler Thompson said:
9/10/2007 2:10 pm
David,
When you clone a drive, it copies it exactly as it were before. It does not recognise the difference in size. You need to go into disk management to fix this problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000
Please register on our forums and post a thread here for more specialized help. Thanks! http://forum.pcmech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40
[Reply]
Big Ste said:
9/26/2007 4:43 pm
Very helpful, thanks. Saved me a lot of messing around.
Just the right amount of geekiness in my opinion for what it’s worth! If you don’t know the difference between ide & sata then you need to read up on that before trying to fit a new disk drive or you’ll end up buyiing the wrong one and breaking it trying to make it fit!
Cheers, keep up the good work.
[Reply]
Ravenwolfvoyager said:
9/29/2007 1:14 pm
Great article, I really appreciate the simplicity involved and the easy to follow instructions. I did have just a couple of questions. If I’m replacing my hard drive I understand that in order to clone the hard drive I need to have the new hard drive act as the slave drive which I get, do I need to format the new hard drive after I do this? Also just out of curiosity, if you upgrade your hard drive beyond 120gb and say I had a 60gb prior I read somewhere that you would need to purchase a driver card in order to take full advantage of the entire hard drive capacity beyond the 120gb. Thanks all!
[Reply]
Jakey said:
10/2/2007 11:08 am
I have no experience whatsoever and didnt even know the difference bewteen the cables but you have saved me 50.00 possibly more i know what pc people are like.
I feel great after installing my new drive and am not formatting it then i will be installing windows.
woot
thanks again
jakey
[Reply]
jimmy said:
10/4/2007 6:09 am
very helpful you guys are legends
[Reply]
Bob said:
10/8/2007 1:29 pm
I have a unique problem installing a new HD. I am literate,
but not geek (all the way) …
I have a Dell GX 240 Tower with 1GB ram,and its a 1.2.GHZ pentium 4 system. I did not install the belwo mentioned system…
I have three HD’s installed currently two 20GB and a 10 GB.
one of the 20 GB is Primary and the other two are slaves.
I just bought a ATA 320GBHD. Read the partition posts, and figure I would need to “ghost” the OS, or would a clean install be better and ghost the rest of the programs?
Then there is the BIOS It says A5. Do I need to change this,to another value?
emails appreciated
[Reply]
CHaz from Moscow said:
11/1/2007 7:54 pm
I have been trying to install a drive and my computer says
CHange from stand alone to master. I feel really stupid. I have changed the jumpers to master. Two hardrives are Western Digital and one is a Maxtor.
They all are marked master slave etc.
I tried to re-set boot priority and drive priority, but I get the same thing. Please help.
By the way, I grew up in St. Pete and worked in Tampa “Seminole Heights” for a couple of years. Live in Moscow Russia now. NIce to see some floridians.
Chaz
[Reply]
Tyler Thompson said:
11/1/2007 11:09 pm
Chaz, please register on our forums for more specialized help. Registration is free and the forums are specifically for tech issues such as yours.
Thank you and I hope you get your issues resolved!
Tyler Thompson
PCMechanic Editor-in-Chief
tyler@pcmech.com
[Reply]
steve scott said:
11/6/2007 4:09 pm
hi i am having trouble installing my new sata harddrive i have pluged it in and wanted to use it as a second harddrive but it is not being reconised i went in to bios but im not sure what im looking for in there. there is power gettingto the drive and the conections are secure. could any one help.
[Reply]
Glenn said:
11/7/2007 2:59 am
Steve - if all is connected then u must format - see above under ‘Software Installation/Cloning’
I’ve just added a second and had no idea about formating which led me to being here.
[Reply]
Kyle said:
11/9/2007 2:12 am
Well I just wanted to say that i have been struggling with my sata HD for over a week now. I had done everything i could think of. And your little guide here solved my problem.
I had no idea that “disk management” section existed
Once i found it i initialized the HD and am currently formatting it.
Thank you very much.
I really appeciate it
[Reply]
malcolm said:
11/9/2007 6:08 am
Hi
I’ve got a system with a 40gig drive which i want to ghost to a 250gig drive. How do i clone the 40gig drive onto the 250gig without formatting the 250gig. Is there a way that i can create an image of the 40gig and still have my 250 gig unammended?
malcolm
[Reply]
angie said:
11/11/2007 3:44 pm
hey i have been trying to get this to work ok so this is what i am doing i have a shuttle computer and it was having probs so i bought an acer from school i tore the shuttle apart and replaced the acers harddrive with the one from the shuttle i also added in my ram but i got it all to pop up on the screen and i put the operating system disc windows xp home edition in and was trying to install that but i get a few steps in and it keeps saying setup didnt find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. and i cant figure out how to get past this and what is wrong? can some one please help me.
[Reply]
Steve said:
11/13/2007 10:15 am
Hi my problem is that my new replacement HD (my old one had a catastrophic failure) does not seem to be recognised - the sata cable is well planted in both the motherboard and hd and the power is connected - oddly in bios it is not seen, the only drives recognised are my two dvd drives (both ide) - when I use my Windows setup disc in one of these drives it seems to put some drivers info into the machine - the Windows setup then stops and says it cannot go further please press F3 to restart - when this is done the restart post then shows the HD as being present - why is the hd not recognised and then after the partial Windows setup then recognised ? From this point I have once had Windows work sucessfully but when powered down completely the machine reverted to not seeing the hard drive in bios and only the two dvd ide drives are seen in bios - any ideas - or any solutions would be greatly appreciated
Asus K8V motherboard
Sata Samsung HD 500gb
[Reply]
Kirk said:
12/2/2007 12:27 pm
Joshcore, Thank you for the help with my cable select pondry. I have My Pri Master and DVD burner on IDE0, and I needed to add 2 more HDD from my old computer to pull information off, and use them as more storage. I was trying to set the 2 HDD on IDE1 (Secondary) as Master and slave, and it wouldn’t work. Using cable select worked out great. Thank you!
[Reply]
Dyan said:
12/22/2007 11:20 am
Joshcore, I purchased an external HDD caddy, and am trying to install and format an IDE 2.5″ hard drive (160GB, max partition 40GB) to it. This is my first time to get my hands dirty to install. Would you please kindly walk me thru?. My PC is running on 2000XP with FAT32. Please advise me physical installation, formatting and set partitions to the drive. Your help is greatly appreciated!
Dyan
[Reply]
Dyan said:
12/29/2007 11:32 am
Joshcore, can you reply me. Thanks!!
Dyan
[Reply]
s said:
1/2/2008 2:17 pm
I am installing a second hard drive (60 GB, to be used for data only) on my 2 year old computer. The computer bios recognizes the two hard drives, but Windows does not see the second hard drive.
The first hard drive is SATA, the second which came from an older computer is IDE. I have changed the jumpers on the IDE hard drive, but Windows does not see the second HD.
Any suggestions on how to successfully install the second HD.
Thanks,
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Bob said:
1/13/2008 5:47 pm
Fantastic!!! Took me hours of wading through other websites of gobbledygook to get nowhere. Once I found you I was just a few minutes from nirvana! I know just enough to be dangerous to myself and all computers around me. Your page sent me through the steps I needed and “I’m OK now” Thanks guys, I’ll be back!
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june said:
1/28/2008 7:10 pm
I am so not computer literate,so be easy on me. I have a dell and it was givng me a message that there was no boot drive installed, repeatedly for months. Sometimes it woudl boot up and sometimes it wouldn’t. Would this be my hard drive.
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Mark said:
1/31/2008 2:43 am
My old hard drive crashed. I installed a 160GB hard drive and it appears to have installed correctly. However, when I loaded XP the icons did not appear and I no programs are on the hard drive. Could that be something wrong with my XP cd?
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Jon Amoncio said:
2/12/2008 3:12 am
My motherboard was crashed and need to be replaced. I have a spare one which i utilize as of time while awaiting for its replacement. however, when i installed the HDD, the system didn’t work? Is there any way to change the configuration of my System? My HDD has a Windows XP Pro Installed in it prior the crashed of motherboard. what do i need to do in order to make it work in different motherboard? i don’t want to reformat the HDD. please lat me know… Thanks
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Mario said:
2/18/2008 5:45 pm
Dumb question??… Since the “S” in SATA stands for “serial”, can 2 SATA drives be connected in serial? I only have 2 SATA ports on my motherboard. One is used by my system hard drive (the drive that came with my computer), and the other is used by my SATA CD/DVD drive. I would like to add a 2nd SATA hard drive and was wondering if it can be connected in serial with the existing hard drive. Otherwise I would have to get an IDE drive because I do have an extra IDE port. I would prefer to go SATA all the way.
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Paul said:
2/22/2008 11:50 pm
i have a SATA hard drive and their is a driver issue and ITS PISSIN ME OFF (sorry had to say that) turns out that this HD isn’t being reconised in try to figure out if its damaged and trying to use the internet divers but nothings working so far…..
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Spiv said:
3/2/2008 11:49 pm
Hi there,
I have a notebook with a Fujitsu MHT 2040AT, (40GB 4200rpm HD). I believe this is a ATA-6 model.
I can pull it out by just removing 1 screw.
Can I replace it with a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 ST9200420AS 200GB 7200 RPM, which is SATA?
thanks,
Spiv
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israel said:
3/3/2008 12:59 am
———HELP PLEASE——-
i am putting a unpartioned hard drive in my computer as my slave hard drive. i have windows xp so it is not showing up on my computer. so im following the steps to format it. but the “Initialize Disk” wizard pop up, wont show up. is there a place to download it or what should i do? please let me know. my email address is: israelbilodeau@hotmail.com thanks
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dg said:
3/10/2008 3:49 pm
hi,
i hav just purchased a seagate 250GB sata drive. it is the only drive in the machine, i hav installed it and it is working but it only shows a 127GB capacity in windows xp. any ideas on why? or what i’v done wrong?
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Duane Price said:
3/21/2008 4:48 pm
Thanks so much for your help. It had been a long time since I had changed a hard drive and I was a little concerned about doing it. After finding your article, written so I could understand it, I gained the confidence I needed to do it. It was so easy and now my son-in-law’s computer works great.
Thanks,
Duane
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Andypandy said:
4/4/2008 6:28 pm
Thanks for this great info, it made my job soooo much easier. I’m now up to 1TB for more films!! All clean of course. Cheers!
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David said:
4/19/2008 7:41 am
Great! It worked, thank you!
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John Oliver said:
5/23/2008 4:02 pm
Excellent article. I’ve moved a lot of existing drives around but I guess the one I just installed was the first new out of the box drive I’ve installed and I didn’t realize you had to format them. Makes sense, but I just didn’t think about it. Thanks for getting me back on the right track.
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David D said:
6/3/2008 12:56 pm
I’m planning a hard drive replacement. What are the pro’s and con’s of cloning the old drive versus a Windows reinstall? If I put the old drive in an external drive case, can I clone from this location versus the internal cable?
Thanks.
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Kramium said:
6/28/2008 10:14 pm
G’day David Risley,
Great help from your website! I tried going to Dell & to XP help sites but there are too many related instructions & not really what I needed. To others out there who are stumped by techy terminology, I suggest browsing a little bit more sites & things will fall into place. Heck, I’ve even had to go to Wikipedia to understand what SATA is!
Great website! I’ve saved this to my useful websites list for easy reference!
Thanks, matey!
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