Introduction
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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).
Next Step?
You’ll need to backup and restore your data to your new hard drive. This is VERY time-consuming usually. PCMech has long been a fan of Acronis True Image. This full-featured backup/restore utility from a trusted company will help you clone your PC and restore it to your new hard drive.
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Awesome job man, helped me out a ton, thnx a bunch!
Thanks very much for the advice. Easy to follow and did exactly what it was meant to do.
This looks like a great site. I liked this posting, but I am installing (one at a time) TWO formatted *IDE* HDDs *with* data on them. I want to transfer the data onto one of the SATA drives I already have inside the PC.
I tried doing this using a “USB converter kit” but it didn’t work.
I now have one of the HDDs connected to the mobo with an 80-pin IDE ribbon cable. The HDDs *DO* power up and “spin” ….. they DO show up in Device Manager, but do NOT show up in My Computer or Windows explorer.
I have left both HDDs unjumpered, which puts them in Slave status.
Any ideas? Thank you in advance !
Great!! Thanks for the help. JUst used HDClone to upgrade my Hard Drive.
Thanks, this really came in handy considering the drive instructions (Hitachi) said nothing of how to install and even their online info was pretty lacking.
thank you for your help i will need this soon for cctv.
thanks this is very easy to work and i want to know that i want to put two hard drives in my machine but i want only one hard drive work what should i do
Hello, I installed a 2t hard drive but know mt computer don't turn on and just is doing a beep.
What do I need to do to get it to work?
You should know that in order to keep your HDD alive as long as possible you should use a backup software like http://www.dmailer.com/dmailer-backup.html , is free and you can store online on their servers , and also you should format from time to time , because every format is fixing like 85-90% of all problems
I followed your advice step by step and installed and formatted a new slave drive. Everything works fine! Thank You very much!
When you purchase a hard drive for a computer, one of the choices you may need to make is if the hard drive will be a 7200rpm hard drive or a 5400rpm hard drive. As you may have already guessed, the rpm of a hard drive is one of the factors that is considered in assessing a hard drive’s speed, and a 7200rpm hard drive spins faster than a 5400rpm hard drive and therefore can access data faster.
One of the problems with 7200rpm and faster hard drives is heat. When it comes to computers and their components, heat is a killer. A 7200rpm hard drive (and even a machine with two 7200rpm hard drives) should do quite well in terms of heat. Once you start moving to hard drive that run at 10,000rpm or more, however (e.g. Seagate Cheetah drives), then you need to consider special cooling for the drives to keep the temperature of the computer down to a safe level.http://www.harddiskdriverepair.com/failure/genius.html
can i change my hard drive and use the recovery disc that came with my compter to install programs
i had vista before changed the hard drive and install xp now i have problems to conect wireless to internet
does any have the answer to the last post
Thanks for giving a step by step guide. this is a very useful post for all beginners out there. cheers!
Can I mix IDE & SATA? That is master IDE and slave SATA.
helo! can u help me of how to set jumper as slave and primary?//
Each IDE/ATA channel can support either one or two devices. IDE/ATA devices of course each contain their own integrated controllers, and so in order to maintain order on the channel, it is necessary to have some way of differentiating between the two devices. This is done by giving each device a designation as either master or slave, and then having the controller address commands and data to either one or the other. The drive that is the target of the command responds to it, and the other one ignores the command, remaining silent.
Note that despite the hierarchical-sounding names of “master” and “slave”, the master drive does not have any special status compared to the slave one; they are really equals in most respects. The slave drive doesn’t rely on the master drive for its operation or anything like that, despite the names (which are poorly-chosen–in the standards the master is usually just “drive 0″ and the slave “drive 1″). The only practical difference between master and slave is that the PC considers the master “first” and the slave “second” in general terms. For example, DOS/Windows will assign drive letters to the master drive before the slave drive. If you have a master and slave on the primary IDE channel and each has only one regular, primary partition, the master will be “C:” and the slave “D:”. This means that the master drive (on the primary channel) is the one that is booted, and not the slave.
Devices are designated as master or slave using jumpers, small connectors that fit over pairs of pins to program the drive through hardware. Each manufacturer uses a different combination of jumpers for specifying whether its drive is master or slave on the channel, though they are all similar. Some manufacturers put this information right on the top label of the drive itself, while many do not; it sometimes takes some hunting around to find where the jumper pins are on the drive even once you know how the jumpers are supposed to go. The manufacturers are better about this now than they have been in the past, and jumpering information is always available in the manual of the hard disk, or by checking the manufacturer’s web site and searching for the model number. I describe (and illustrate) the jumpers on IDE/ATA disks in detail in the section on hard disk construction. For a fundamental description of what jumpers are, see here.
ATAPI devices such as optical, Zip and tape drives are jumpered in pretty much the same way as hard disks. They have the advantage of often having their jumpers much more clearly labeled than their hard disk counterparts. Most optical drives, for example, have three jumper blocks at the back, labeled “MA” (master), “SL” (slave) or “CS” (cable select).
If you are using two drives on a channel, it is important to ensure that they are jumpered correctly. Making both drives the master, or both the slave, will likely result in a very confused system. Note that in terms of configuration, it makes no difference which connector on the standard IDE cable is used in a standard IDE setup, because it is the jumpers that control master and slave, not the cable. This does not apply when cable select is being used, however. Also, there can be electrical signaling issues if one connects a single drive to only the middle connector on a cable, leaving the end connector unattached. In particular, the use of Ultra DMA is not supported in such a configuration; see the discussion of the 80-conductor Ultra DMA cable for more information.
As long as one drive is jumpered as master and the other as slave, any two IDE/ATA/ATAPI devices should work together on a single channel. Unfortunately, some older hard disks will fail to work properly when they are placed on a channel with another manufacturer’s disk. One of the reasons why drives don’t always “play nicely together” has to do with the Drive Active / Signal Present (/DASP) signal. This is an IDE/ATA interface signal carried on pin #39, which is used for two functions: indicating that a drive is active (during operation), and also indicating that a slave drive is present on the channel (at startup). Some early drives don’t handle this signal properly, a residue of poor adherence to ATA standards many years ago. If an older slave drive won’t work with a newer master, see if your master drive has an “SP” (slave present) jumper, and if so, enable it. This may allow the slave drive to be detected.
Drive compatibility problems can be extremely frustrating, and beyond the suggestion above, there usually is no solution, other than separating the drives onto different channels. Sometimes brand X won’t work as a slave when brand Y is the master, but X will work as a master when Y is the slave! Modern drives adhere to the formal ATA standards and so as time goes on and more of these older “problem” drives fall out of the market, making all of this less and less of a concern. Any hard disk bought in the last five years should work just fine with any other of the same vintage or newer.
When using only a single drive on a channel, there are some considerations to be aware of. Some hard disks have only a jumper for master or slave; when the drive is being used solo on a channel it should be set to master. Other manufacturers, notably Western Digital, actually have three settings for their drives: master, slave, and single. The last setting is intended for use when the drive is alone on the channel. This type of disk should be set to single, and not master, when being used alone.
Also, a single device on an IDE channel “officially” should not be jumpered as a slave. In practice, this will often work despite being formally “illegal”. Many ATAPI
Just replaced my old IDE 20G hard drive with new 160G Western Ditigal. Reinstalled Windows XP HOme Edition using NTSF. But when I look at properties it only shows 10G. Now I know I’m a novice but what’s up and how do I get my missing space? – Mac in a PC world.
l had my hard drive wiped now l cannot get internet connection