How to install a Hard Drive

People who have bought their computers a few years back might have the old generation style hard drives installed in them, which have comparatively lower storage space than the newer versions. Today’s hard drives are bigger and cheaper. If you are one among those computer owners who wish to upgrade to the newer and faster hard drives, this article will educate you about some simple steps you will find useful when it comes to installing a hard drive.

The first step is to remove the case cover and make sure that there is an open IDE slot. If you cannot find an open IDE slot, change the IDE cable you are currently using to one with more connectors. Find an empty bay to install the new hard drive. It is always better to provide some space between your old hard drive and new hard drive. Providing an open hard drive bay between your existing hard drive and the new hard drive keeps your hard drives cool.

The next step is to change the jumper settings to slave if the device on the cable is already set to master. This purely depends on how many devices are currently installed on both master and secondary IDE slots. Generally most people prefer to set their hard drive as the master device. If there is no other device on the cable, set your hard drive as the master itself.

Place your hard drive in the appropriate bay. Remember the silver side of the hard drive should be on the top and the connector should face towards the motherboard. This helps you easily plug it in. The next step is to find an extra power cord from the power supply and connect it to the hard drive. If you don’t have an extra power cord, you can buy splitters to split the power supply. Plug your IDE cable into the hard drive. You have finished with the connection, now close the computer case.

The next step is to format and install programs on your hard drive. Depending on which operating system you are using, you will need to boot from the CD and create partitions in the hard disk. You can partition the hard drive and make separate logical drives as you see fit. After creating separate partitions, you need to format the hard drive before installing any software. If you are using a latest version of Windows operating system, you can do this after restarting your system. What you need to do is to go to computer management options (you can open this window by right clicking in the ‘My Computer’ and select ‘Manage’) and then select Disk Manager on the left side, click the new drive and make your new partition from there. After creating the partition, format the new hard drive so that you can use it.

If you wish to use the newly installed hard drive as your primary drive, then you need some software to clone your hard drive, for example Norton Ghost. These cloning software programs will create an identical drive with all the programs and drivers quite similar to your old hard drive, the only difference being the additional storage space available on the new drive.

Now you are almost complete with installing a hard drive. Once more check all the connections and make sure that the drive is connected correctly as master or slave. It is advisable to replace the covers before reconnecting the mains. Check whether your BIOS have automatically detected the new hard drive when it boots. After your operating system has loaded, you should now see your new hard drive in the ‘My Computer’ (or similar). The letter assigned to the new drive will depend on your computer’s configuration.

Check Hard Drive USA for additional resources on hard drives.

About the Author:
Mac McClellan is the webmaster for Hard Drive USA http://harddriveusa.com, a useful site for information and resources on hard drives.