Technical Upgrading A Computer Installing A Hard Drive

Installing A Hard Drive

Take the time to prepare a bootable floppy and make sure it actually boots before hand. Copy the DOS - Edit, Fdisk, Format, Sys and Scandisk utilities to it.
If you are installing a 32 bit recent operating system on a machine that supports booting from CD-ROM in the CMOS setup, you can skip the boot floppy creation and use the operating system CD if you change the option in the CMOS setup first.

Hardware Installation

As always, when you are dealing with electrical appliances you have to take safety precautions. Power down and unplug your personal computer from the mains and disconnect all other leads if you intend to move the case about. Before you handle any electrical components, discharge any static electricity you might be carrying by earthing yourself. Touch a metal pipe or the machines chafes or use an antistatic wrist strap if your paranoid. Undo the screws and take the lid off your personal computer.

Check out the drive fixings and where it is going to fit in your machine. It may be necessary to first remove an expansion card to make access easier. Most hard drives are 3.5 inch and do not need any special mounting hardware, unless you need to fit your drive in a 5.25 inch bay.
IDE cables tend to be short so you may need to move another IDE device first.

Many drives list the CMOS settings to match the drives, on a label, so make sure and take a note of this before installation. If you are replacing an older drive, remove it. If you are only fitting a single drive then there is no need to move any jumpers on the drive and it should work in its default configuration. If you are adding a second drive, one drive may need to be nominated as a master and the other a slave, which will involve moving jumpers, perhaps on both drives. If you have a spare secondary IDE channel you can always leave the default settings and simply plug it in to the secondary IDE channel, providing you haven't changed any ROM drives from their default slave setting, should you have one already fitted. If you already have a hard drive and ROM drive connected on the same IDE channel, I recommend moving the ROM drive to the secondary channel with the second hard drive as the master.

Slide the drive into the vacant bay and take care not to snag anything and tighten up the bolts. Insert a spare power plug and the data ribbon cable to the drive. Most ribbon cables are polarised, but the coloured stripe on the ribbon cable indicates pin 1. Plug the other end of the ribbon cable in to the primary IDE channel interface if you are replacing an existing drive, making sure to align the coloured edge with pin 1. I recommend connecting a second drive with a separate ribbon cable to the secondary EIDE interface.

Put the lid back on your computer but do not screw it down yet. Plug in the video, keyboard, mains and other necessary cables, power up the machine and enter the CMOS setup by pressing the appropriate key, e.g. <Del> or <F2>. Select the auto-detect hard drive option from the CMOS setup menu. This will interrogate the drive and find the values listed on the label. Otherwise you will need to change the Drive Type in the Standard CMOS submenu (usually) and select Drive Type 47 or User Defined then manually input the values on the drive label, assuming of course that everything is correctly connected inside the machine. You will be asked for the number of cylinders and sectors per track, Write Pre-compensation and Landing Zone. Exit and save changes. Power down the machine and do up the screws then plug in any remaining cables. You now have to partition the hard disk.

Partitioning A Hard Disk

Partitioning a hard drives disks from your boot disk (if you made one) is done using the Fdisk utility. If you are asked about using a large disk and Fat32, choose yes the default and you will be able to use a single partition size larger than 8 gigabytes. Choosing no changes the format to Fat16, which is less efficient and limited functionality. (Windows 98 lets you change from Fat16 to Fat32 if you later install it you will have the option). Fat16 is faster than Fat32 (slightly) however leaves more slack and wastes space. The smallest sector of a Fat16 formatted disk depends on the size of the drive unlike Fat32 which just uses 4 Kbytes a sector.

Load Fdisk, from the menu you are presented with select 1, Create DOS Partition and 1 again, Create \Primary DOS Partition. Choose to make the hard drive one partition if that is what you want. Quit from Fdisk and the machine should reboot or ask you to do it. You now have to high level format it, using the Format utility on your floppy disk.
Type : format c: /s to format your new drive and transfer the system files to it.
Or
Type: format d: to format your second hard drive without transferring the system files to it.
For an explanation of the format utility simply type format /? at the prompt.

Once this is done, remove the floppy disk, reboot and see if it boots from the hard disk. Your new hard drive can now have software installed on it.

If you have a BIOS that recognises and can boot from CD-ROM, you simply boot from the operating CD and follow the instructions on screen. Windows 98 will partition and format your new drive for you before it copies and installs all the necessary files needed for Windows if the drive is on the primary master channel.

Be careful formatting a new drive if you have more than one in your machine. The first drive is assigned the letter C when using DOS and Windows and each physical hard drive is assigned the letter B and so on. Any logical partitions you may have created with the Fdisk utility will be assigned a letter after the physical drives and finally the CD-ROM drive will be assigned a letter. If you simply have one drive, with one large partition the CD will be letter D.

Almost every new BIOS allows you to boot from any hard drive you may have installed in your machine. It is possible to change the boot sequence, install two different operating system on two drives and choose which you wish to boot to as often as you want.

If you are installing a bigger hard drive as the master and want to keep the older drive too, I still recommend you perform a completely new installation of your operating system if you use Windows 9x. It is possible to transfer your existing files and settings to your new hard drive and eventually continue as if the only thing that changed was the free space on your disk, but if you want to attempt that there are a lot of useful utilities already available you could try. (Norton Ghost comes to mind) However now would be a good time to clear out everything. With your older drive as the slave it will appear in Windows as a drive letter and all your original installation files and data will still be there.

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