Installing A Hard Drive – Step by Step

by on Jul 30, 2007 | 162 comments

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.

Discover how well Acronis True Image Home 2011 and Windows 7 work together to better protect your PC.

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Newer Comments →
  • Ryan

    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+

    • Stefen Kaur

      I have a question. What about if you have a IDE hard drive and you upgraded it with a SATA adapter? So now the data connects by SATA instead of IDE. Do you still need to have a jumper on the hard drive or does the microboard in the adapter handle that like the new SATA drives do?

      I ask because here’s the setup I am faced with: Three hard drives, a new motherboard that can control up to six SATA drives, two of the drives are actual SATA drives, one is IDE with a jumper install. I upgraded the IDE with a SATA adapter(should I remove the jumper then?). So now I have three SATA drives. I connect the one with the operating system on it to SATA 1, the brnd new SATA drive to SATA 2, ad the IDE converted to SATA to SATA 3. Problem arises when the system is running the operating system boots. But in Windows one of the two drives doesn’t appear. If I disconnect the second drive the third one appears and vice versa. Suggestions?

  • Joshcore

    ^

    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.

  • Ryan

    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.

  • Joshcore

    ^ 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.

    • SkyPioneer

      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.

      • Nunyabiz

        If this guide was honestly too much for you or anyone with more than a room temp IQ to understand then you seriously have no business doing this yourself anyway.
        The guide you need is directions to your nearest PC repair shop and let that $6 per hour trainee do it for you.

        The only thing I think is lacking is to have some mention of people that are also changing operating systems at the same time they are changing their hard drive which is fairly common.
        Especially from WinXP 32bit to Vista 64bit.

    • Robert

      Great Article. Helped me to successfully install a second drive to my Compaq SR2020 tower. I didnt know many of the terms either but took a few minutes to learn what they were and then followed the clear steps to install, config and run the two drive setup. Thanks for the instructions! Very helpful!!

  • E.Thornton

    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

  • Joshcore

    Well done, Ernie :)

  • William

    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.

  • Rivers

    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?

  • Gary Hart

    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

  • Richard

    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.

  • JP

    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?

  • Elliot

    Thanks! Easy to understand! Even for a non-too compuer literate such as myself!

    Cheers!

  • LD

    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.

    • mark

      Hi Did you sort out this issue as I have the same issue?

      • Gwen

        Would like to know the same answer of not format=ting the second (slave) hard drive. I have lots of data on there that I need to keep can I install it without formatting?

  • tysun

    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.

  • Ravi

    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

  • thenson

    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

    • Nepe

      I installed my original HD in the second bay as a slave and was able to access my files. I did a virus scan of the HD before transferring the files. When my daughter’s computer died, I put HER HD in an external enclosure and used it as an external HD. That’s another option.

      Hope this helps.

  • Germ

    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.

  • Darklance

    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.

  • Janine

    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

  • walter

    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

  • Mitch

    Thanks alot, THE BEST step by step tutorial that I have found. Clear and accurate, thanks heaps!

  • Giga

    thenson,
    the guy who told you your your computer was fried was probably a jerk and put the virus on himself.

  • cher

    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

  • Kieron

    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

  • Andy

    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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