Installing a new hard drive, some help?

If you only have one hard drive in your PC, this is a pretty easy procedure. Just make your existing hard drive the master then set your new one to slave - you do this via the jumpers on the back of the hard disks and the connection order of the primary IDE cable.

Anyway, providing your system setup isn't too complicated, you should be able to install it without disrupting your current PC much.

That said, it's never a bad idea to backup current info..

The HD you buy will probably come with instrunctions and software for installation. I recently installed a new HD and it was no big deal. But it is a good idea to always have a boot disk on hand.

Mark is OTM. Nine times out of ten, all you have to do is open up the computer, plug the new HD into an empty slot and connect a free IDE connector to the back and then the OS will take over from there. (I was all concerned about transferring files from my old computer to my new one, but Windows XP is an absolute star about recognizing hard drives, especially ones from older Windows systems. An hour later, I had 16 megs of data transferred over, 58 minutes of which was the actual file transfer process.)

Is it this simple with Win 98 guys? Its an older pc about 5 years old. Can I make a boot disk? I know for sure I don't have the original disk.

What do you mean by boot disk, Chris? If you have Windows 98 installed on your primary hard drive already, you won't have to worry about installing any sort of operating system on the secondary disk.

ok. sounds like it shall be a easy enough project. Mark, I keep reading that I need a boot disk on all these online tutorials. But I realize that if I was making this my primary drive I would need it. I can see myself now, throwing screw drivers and what not. Everytime I have had to install any new hardware on this PC I have had a fit. Except for memory, that was nice and easy. So there should be a little gray adapter on the cord that I would plug the new drive into to make it the slave? then I have to plug it in somewhere else? I'm sure the directions that come with the drive will explain it all. Thanks a lot guys. Any suggestions for a hard drive to purchase?

i believe "jumpers" doesn't refer to any sort of cable, it's those little sets of tiny switches that you must set in a particular pattern to designate the drive as slave

No, you don't need a boot disk to add a second HD but its a *very* good idea to have one in case the main HD crashes and you have to install a new OS (like what happened to me, using windows 98).

But then again, if you don't have the win98 OS CD then you couldn't re-install windows 98 with or without a boot disk anyways.

OK basically most PCs come with the following configuration as far as drive setups go:

IDE Primary (which has room for two connections, a master and a slave)
IDE Secondary (ditto)

Open up your PC and you'll see that some of these four slots are likely already occupied by CD-R/RW drives, DVD-ROM drives, hard drives and God knows what else. In a perfect world your existing hard drive will be located as the Primary/Master and your Primary/Slave spot will be empty. If that's not the case, just look for an empty spot somewhere along those two chains, adjust the jumpers on your new hard drive accordingly (ie. set it to master or slave), and plug it into the right IDE cable (there will be two - one for primary and secondary - and both will have two connectors).

After that, just make sure you also send power to the drive (your PC should have lots of idle power supply cords available), fire it up and see what happens.

In all likelihood, you'll need to format your new drive (probably in DOS) afterwards, but if you do everything else correctly, then a boot disk won't be necessary.

you guys are the greatest tech support Ever!

Actually Chris an easy way to suss out your current IDE situation is to reboot the computer. One of the first things you'll see (before it loads up Windows) is an ASCII table showing your system configuration with processor speed, cache level, memory amount, etc. It'll probably only flash on your screen for a couple seconds (you might try holding it there with the "pause" key), but it should give you a quick and dirty status of your existing IDE connections (or lack thereof).

thanks. i could swear when i attached my cd burner i attached it to that cable from the harddrive. no, im wrong i attached it to the one from my other cd-rom.

Well, I checked out the pc. Seeing as its from 98, there is no room to put another internal hard drive. All I can do is replace the one I got, and its too time consuming and to bothersome for me. I'm bound to fuck it up. So I guess I'll spend the extra dough and get an external. thanks anyways guys.

Chris, don't give up yet. You say there's no room to put another hard drive, but do you mean cable or actual physical space? If the physical space is the issue, depending on how confident you're feeling, you can just transplant the whole works into a newer and bigger case, possibly. (Or you may want to pay someone to do this for you.) If it's an issue of there not being enough connectors on the hard drive cable, you can easily fix that by buying an IDE cable that has three connectors instead of just two (one to motherboard, one each for the drives).

Or, if it is that you don't have enough connectors, if you have a cd burner and a normal cd drive and they're both IDE, can you do without one of the cd drives?

If the case is full then if you're careful then it won't hurt to keep the case off for half an hour or so, prop one of the hard disks somewhere flattish that the IDE cable will reach with the case open (put it on top of one of the other drives if you want but avoid the metal casing touching each other, maybe a pile of paper and/or bubblewrap between?) and have both connected at once for just long enough to copy any old stuff across, then take the old one away and install the new one properly as master. You might get away with copying the entire directory structure across from one disk to the other but if you go that route you should consider installing Windows afresh on your nice new HD while it's empty and you may well end up having to reinstall it whether you like it or not.

I don't really know anything though so it would probably be best to wait for someone else at least not to go "OH MY GOD NO DON'T" before you do any of the second option, but hey, I did it when I got drive #2 of the three HDs currently installed and I didn't destroy anything, errr, I don't think. The PSU died messily nine months later but that was only related in that it was a nastily pre-built machine just like I should really have expected from anything with such a nonstandard case size and layout. Sigh.

The second option would be accomplished much more easily with a copy of Norton Ghost, and would allow you to essentially duplicate your current hard drive onto the new one. Trying to copy files directly over can be a bit of a pain unless you know EXACTLY which ones you need, and it would likely mean reinstalling all of your applications. Ghost should give you a (nearly) perfect copy of your old system on a newer, larger drive.

thanks for asking this question chris, as i has saved me the bother, i so need another HD as my current one is only 3GB and is almost full (of stupid songs downloaded from assorted file-sharing systems)

Or alternately you could get a massive case, a RAID card and go whole hog!