MensXpert.com - Installing A New Hard Drive On Your PC

One unshakable truth about personal computers is that you can never be satisfied with your hard disk space. Mammoth 3D games, movies, songs, space-hogging software ensure that you are never content with the space you originally started with. So if you feel that your current 80 GB hard drive is no longer able to accommodate the amount of information you want to stuff into your PC, it’s high time you visit your neighbourhood computer store and get yourself a higher capacity hard drive.

Thankfully, you can perform huge-capacity upgrades at very reasonable prices. If you bargaining powers are good, you can convince the storekeeper to sell you a 2509 GB hard drive for as less as Rs. 3000. Moreover, you don’t even have to lug your system unit to the store to get it installed. In fact if you carefully read through these Xpert tips, you can easily install one at home in less than half an hour, which however doesn’t include the formatting time. So here are some important steps to guide you in installing a new hard disk either as a new boot drive or just to serve the purpose of maximising your storage.

Step 1

Back up your PC and scout around

Before you get down to opening your PC, it’s extremely important to back up all your important files on external drives, online storage or optical discs. Then, see if the hard drive you purchased came with an installation CD, which provides not just upgrade assistance but important drive specific information as well. The CD may also be used later to copy all important information from one disk drive to another. It’s important to first install this particular software onto to your computer. Then, switch off your computer, unplug all wires and cables and open the system unit case.

Then look inside the unit. The first thing you will need to do will be to determine which slot your drive will go into. Slots for hard drives are usually located just below the slots which can be accessed from front and which are meant for housing DVD and CD drives. If you intend to replace your hard drive and realise that there’s no empty slot, then your hardware upgrading will involve a few more steps, which can’t be covered in this article. However, if you are replacing your old drive with new, and thus have an empty slot to place your new drive in, follow our Xpert tips for steps for fitting a second drive. After you have formatted the drive, clone your old hard drive’s content into the new drive by either using Norton Ghost or a similar sort of program. Then follow step III and IV to get to PC to boot from the new drive.

Before I wrote this article, I installed a SATA drive on my PC, but the process will remain the same irrespective of kind of the hard disk you choose to install. The SATA drive I installed had a seven pin, thin data cable; IDE hard drives have a 40-pin grey coloured ribbon cable. If you aren’t sure of the drive your PC already has, either check its label or documentation. Most computers which are were assembled a year or two back had IDE hard drives, and wont support the SATA drives (which are a lot faster) unless they have a preinstalled SATA PCI card. Recent PCs though support SATA drives, and support IDE drives as well.

Xpert Tip: If you’re planning to transfer Windows XP from your old hard drive to your new one, you will need to reauthorize Windows.

Step 2

Examine all power and data connections

Most hard drives come with a data cable (IDE or SATA), and some SATA drives come with a power adapter, cable and screws. If the one you purchased didn’t come with additional cables, you will have to buy them separately.

Let’s first start with the data connection. If you are putting a SATA hard drive and using it as a secondary storage, assuming that your current hard drive is also a SATA, follow the cable attached to the drive to its other end. Check, if you can find a port for the SATA drive either on an interface card or on the motherboard. If you aren’t able to locate one, go through the configuration documentation of your PC.

If you are planning to add an IDE hard drive as a secondary drive, you will probably be able to connect it to an IDE optical drive or to the same data cable as it’s connected to your primary IDE drive. Then look for the third, unused connector which should be there in the middle of the cable, which is basically used for connecting your current IDE drive to your motherboard. It’s important to note that some of the older computers, instead of using the 80 conductor IDE cables that are required by the new hard drives, use the 40 conductor ones. But the 80 conductor cables are backward compatible, meaning both types use the same 40-pin connector. So, if required you can easily swap your kit’s 80-conductor cable with a 40.

Now you would need to consider the power connection. The SATA hard drive uses a 15 pin power connector. If your PC is already using a SATA drive, just follow the power cable attached to it, and see if you can find a free power supply lead with the same type of connector. If you have found one, choose that particular lead for your new hard drive.

There are certain varieties of SATA drives, which support legacy Molex four-pin power connectors, so you can use either SATA or Molex connectors. You can also look for an unused Molex-style lead. If you are still out of luck you will just need to look for an adapter – either a Molex to SATA adapter or just a Y-adapter, which splits a particular lead into two.

Step 3

Mounting and connecting the drives

While trying to install SATA drives, jumper settings never really become an issue. This, however, doesn’t hold true for IDE settings, where the jumper will indicate whether a particular drive is a master drive or slave (secondary) drive. Check the drive’s documentation and its settings. If your computer just has a single IDE drive, it will most probably be set as the master drive. Assuming that you plug another IDE drive from its cable, the new hard drive will be set as slave. You will later need to manually change the settings of the jumper to “primary” or master -and then fix the hard drive to the end of the cable – that is manually change your original boot drive and instead use the new hard drive as the boot drive. Another option you have is to set both the IDE drives using an 80 conductor cable to the CSEL jumper setting. The computer will by itself figure out the slave/master status of the drives as per the drives placement on the drives on the cable. The master drive will be the one attached to the end and slave will be in the middle.

Next, take a good look at your current drive in order to see if the mounting rails are fixed at the sides. If that’s the case, screw in a set on the new hard drive and carefully slide the hard drive into the slot, and screw it in. Four screws will do the trick.

Then fix one end of the SATA data cable, which is marked for proper insertion, onto the SATA which will either be there on the interface card or the motherboard. IDE data cables, which are also marked, carry a deep red stripe that lines up with the "pin 1" as marked on the drive.

Step 4

BIOS Configuration

Next, boot the BIOS setup utility of your PC and see if it is able to correctly recognise the new hard drive and its positions in the correct drive order. To check, start your PC and see which particular key is able launch the utility. Once you’re there, also try to check if the "auto-detect" has been selected for the all the drives. If you are allowed by the utility to choose the correct boot order, you should give priority to the intended boot drive instead of the other hard drive.

Save these changes and then exit from the utility. The computer will now reboot.

Step 5

Partitioning and Formatting your hard drive

The PC, in which I installed the hard drive runs on Windows XP, which allows you to format and partition drives within the Windows system. The older versions, such as Me and 98, lets you perform these tasks from DOS.

If you are using Windows 2000 or XP, use the disk management utility to format your system.

Click on Start > go to the Control Panel > then to Administrative Tools > Click on PC or Computer Management, and select Disk Management. Your new hard drive will appear, most probably with a black coloured bar, which indicates that this particular drive hasn’t been partitioned.

Then click on next, and check to see if the Primary Partition has been selected or not; then click on Next again, in order to specify the partition Size of the screen and then click on Next which would take you to next screen, where you should select the Assign the following drive letter option. Click on Next again and make sure that the Format this partition with the following settings has been selected and that the File system reads the words NTFS. Then click on next for last time and the formatting will start.

Formatting a drive could take up to an hour, depending on the size and capacity of the drive. But if the drive, after it has been formatted, has less size than was claimed by the package, you shouldn’t be surprised. A 250GB hard drive, for example, is able to format up to a maximum of 230 GB, as a portion of the hard drive will always remain inaccessible.