Hardrives

Before Installation

Installing a hard drive is a pretty easy job. You can do it, but it can get confusing if its your first time. 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.

Before starting, make sure you have a system disk. This is a disk that has the necessary files for your computer to boot off of. You need to make sure your system disk works now. You will need to boot your system with it in order to complete the set up of your new hard drive.

If you are adding a second hard drive, you need to decide which one will be the master and which one will be the slave. The master is your drive C. The other one is the slave. Look at the instructions for the hard drive. It will tell you how to make the drive a master or a slave. They usually come configured as a master, and you simply adjust a jumper on the back of the drive to make it a slave. Pre-286 computers can't handle two hard drives. A later computer can handle two IDE hard drives per IDE channel. This is more than enough for most people.

Get the setup in your mind. Which IDE channel? Master or slave? As a consideration, don't put the hard drive on the same channel as your CD-ROM unless you have to.

Physical Installation

Okay, now lets do it. If you are only installing a second hard drive or a new one, you can skip down to step 5, although this might help as a reference.

1. Back up your old hard drive, turn the computer off, unplug it, and take the case off. You'll want to make sure you back up your old drive first. You can do this with a tape-backup drive or some other form of removable storage. I'd recommend the later of these options, due to their speed and capacity. Also, 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. Remove the cables from the old drive. You will see both a wide IDE ribbon cable and a small 4-pin 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, taking care not to rip the connector off the drive.
3. 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. But, that's part of the fun.
4. Remove the old drive from the case. Be sure not to bump anything too hard on the way out.
5. Slide the new drive in right where the other one came out. If it is smaller than the drive bay ( 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. If you are adding a second drive, just pick any empty drive bay. Screw the drive into place.
6. If you need a separate controller card, install it now into any unused motherboard slot. If you are replacing a non-IDE drive with an IDE drive, you'll need to throw a new IDE controller card in. Most of today's motherboards have two built-on IDE controllers. It is easiest to use these controllers when available, and it saves a slot for something more fun.
7. Attach the cables to the hard drive. Just like a floppy drive, connect the ribbon cable and the power cable. The ribbon cable goes from the controller to the drive. Make sure the red edge of the ribbon cable is in line with Pin 1 on the drive. If you place the cable on backwards, you may get strange errors that make your new drive sound like it has died already.
8. If you are adding a second drive, simply choose a connector on the same ribbon cable that is not used. Most ribbon cables come with three connectors: one on the end and one mid-way, then one further away on the other end which connects to the motherboard. In this case, it doesn't matter which plug goes in what drive. The computer looks at the master/slave jumpers to see which one is Master. Make the second hard drive the slave. The manual should show you how to do this on your particular drive, although many drives have the jumper settings conveniently labeled on the drive itself.
9. If you have not yet done so, replace the screws. First double check your work, though. Also, make sure you use screws short enough not to damage the drive when tightened. Do not force the screws to tighten.
10. Plug the system in , and turn it on with your system disk in Drive A:. It is best to leave the case cover off for now in case you need to fiddle with something or troubleshoot the installation.
11. New hard drives need to be prepared before they will work. You will need to configure it and set the CMOS. When you turn the system on, immediately hit the Hot Key sequence necessary to enter CMOS setup. A lot of times, this is Delete. Go to the section on IDE auto-detection, if your BIOS has this option. Follow the prompt under this section and it will auto-detect the drive. If your BIOS does not support this, then you will need to manually plug the necessary information into setup for the drive. When this is done, exit CMOS and save your changes. The system will reboot. Leave the system disk in Drive A:.
12. When the system completes boot up, it should stop at the A: prompt. Type "fdisk" and hit enter. Follow the prompts to partition the drive.
13. When FDISK is done, you should be able to switch to the C: drive, or whatever letter the new drive happens to be. Now, all you need to do is format the drive. At the A: prompt, type "format x: /s". Replace "x" with the letter of this new drive. This will proceed to format the drive and copy necessary system files to it. After that, you will be able to boot the system off the new hard drive.
14. Now you can copy files to it or whatever. If this is to be your main drive, you can install your operating system now.

Physical Installation - SCSI Drives

1. Take the case off. Find the drive that's in there, if you have one in there. Inspect the ribbon cables. The red edge of the cable should be facing Pin #1 on the drive. Take any notes you may need to help you install the new drive and get the cables right. Then disconnect the ribbon cable and the power supply wires. It may be necessary to remove some other parts to get at the drive.

2. Remove the old drive. It comes out the same way an IDE drive does.

3. Now you need to set any switches or jumpers that need setting on the new drive. In SCSI setups, each device gets its own SCSI ID, numbered 1-7. #7 is usually given to the adapter card. You may pick, then, any other unused address. You may need to take into account any little quirks in your adapter, such as special likings to other addresses that could cause problems a little later. You'll need the manual for this one.

4. Check for the correct termination. In SCSI setups, the adapter can hold up to seven SCSI devices. These devices are hooked up in a chain, usually with the adapter at one end and another device at the other end. This ending device must be set to be the terminating device, therefore ending the SCSI chain. Usually, SCSI devices come with a terminator plug. In some cases, the adapter is in the middle of the chain, therefore you must terminate at both ends of the chain. You may need to consult the manual for any special termination techniques particular to your brand of drive.

5. Slide the drive in and connect the cables. This is the reverse of what you did in steps 1 and 2. Make sure that pin #1 on the ribbon matches up with pin #1 on the drive.

6. Plug the system in and turn it on with a system disk in Drive A:. Continue as normal.

Common Hard Drive Problems:

If you’re like most people, you have either already ran out of space on your hard drive, or you are soon to do so. And you’ll probably go out and get a new hard drive, either new or used. The new ones usually come with software that set the drive up for you, by partitioning and formatting it. The used ones usually don’t. That’s where the trouble starts.
The most common problem I get from people trying to set up their hard drive is: "My (Larger than 2GB) Drive is only showing 2GB." The problem for that is usually in the Operating System (OS for short). The first version of Windows 95, for example, uses a file system called FAT16. That file system limits the size of the hard drive that is visible to the OS to only 2GB. So when you try to make that larger, it won’t let you. Plain and simple as that. You either must partition your hard drive into several 2GB partitions, or upgrade to an OS that with a file system that will support more than 2GB on a partition.

Another reason is because your BIOS has limits. 386 and 486 and lower end Pentium systems have limits of 512MB. Some Pentium Systems are limited to 2GB, and some of the newer ones, are limited to 8GB. It’s all in how the BIOS address the clusters on the Hard drive. It can be corrected with software, that comes with most new drives, like Western Digital’s EZ Drive, and Quantum’s Disk manager just to name a few. They take over where your real BIOS can’t perform, and then addresses the hard drive correctly

The next most common problem I get is "My hard drive says it’s 2GB, but Windows is saying it’s 1.86GB. Where’d that 90MB of space go?" Well, that problem is all in the numbers. The makers of the hard drive count 1MB as 1,000,000 Bytes. Windows counts 1MB as 1,048,576 bytes, a difference of 48,576 bytes. That adds up when you are talking 2,000MB. Let’s do the math.

Makers of hard drive says there are 2,000,000,000 bytes on the drive, so divide that by 1024 to get the number of kilobytes on the drive. Do that again to get the number of megabytes on the drive. Once more for the number of Gigabytes on the drive. You should get 1.862645149GB, or just 1.86GB, which is what Windows is thinking. That’s where your space went, in the numbers.

Another problem I am asked the answer for are a lot of FAT32 ones. "What is FAT32?" "Should I switch to FAT32?" "Can I switch to FAT32 and keep my data on the drive." "What OSs support FAT32."

Versions of Windows95 older than OSR2, as well as any DOS version, operate on a file system called FAT16 (or FAT12 in some cases). The existence of large hard drives has led to large partition sizes, which mean large cluster sizes and wasted space. Under FAT16, a smaller cluster size is better, because a small file takes up a whole cluster if there is even one byte in it; the leftover space is called "slack." FAT32 changed that.

FDISK in Windows 95 OSR2 or later will only allow you to put FAT32 on drives larger than 512MB. (Unless you use the /fprmt switch when starting FDISK) Inside FDISK, you must enable "large disk support," to choose FAT32. After exiting FDISK and rebooting, FORMAT the drive. NOTE that you must manually reboot after exiting FDISK, this is not automatic as in previous versions of FDISK. If you do not reboot between FDISKing and FORMATing, you will get strange-looking error messages.

As always, when you FDISK a drive, you will loose all data. But there are programs out there, like the one that comes with Windows 98, and Partition Magic, that will convert your drive to FAT32 without loosing your data.

With that, I hope that somehow, and someway, your Hard drive upgrades, and future problems, will be easily corrected.