How To Install a New IDE Hard Drive

Installing a new IDE hard drive as a slave to an existing one.
You will probably be doing one of these three things.
1. Replacing your existing hard drive.
2. Adding a second newer hard drive as a slave 'secondardy' to your existing one.
3. Making your new hard drive the Master 'primary' hard drive and attaching your old one as the slave.
REGARDLESS, of which you want to do, you will need to do the following for all three cases.

First of all, lets start with finding your existing hard drive and the jumper settings required for a master/slave configuration. You will have to determine what brand and model of hard drive you currently have. Here are the links to find out your jumper settings if you no longer have a manual for your hard drive.
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Once you find your jumper settings for both your master and slave drives, you will want to print them out or write them down.

Also, you may want to write down the Cylinders/Heads/Sectors.

Now, before you do anything, you need to make a boot disk.

VERY IMPORTANT!

Insert a blank diskette..
AT A DOS PROMPT..Type 'sys a:'
Then copy fdisk.exe, and format.exe and sys.com to the a: drive. (these files are either in; c:\dos OR c:\windows\command)
NOW, SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER, AND TURN IT OFF.
We'll call your old hard drive OLD and your new hard drive NEW, (for lack of a better name.)

At this point you must decide which drive will be the master and which one will be the slave.
WITH YOUR COMPUTER OFF, remove your cover.
Locate your OLD drive, it should be plugged in to a card if it is a 486 or older, OR it will be plugged directly into your motherboard, if it is a Pentium.
MAKE SURE when looking inside your case and before touching anything, to touch the metal frame frequently to GROUND yourself.

This should discharge any static electricity from your body. STATIC IS VERY VERY BAD for electronics.

Now you may or may not have an available bay for your NEW drive. If you don't then you will end up with only your NEW drive at the end. of this little ordeal.

Now, locate the jumper info for your NEW drive. Set the jumpers so that the drive is in the MASTER state.
NOTE: some drives need to be set to MASTER WITH SLAVE PRESENT state.
The drive or docs will say one or the other. master OR master with slave.

Locate a place in your case where the NEW drive will be mounted. Mount the NEW drive with the screws provided.

You will probably need to remove your OLD drive to change the jumper setting to SLAVE on it.

If you are keeping your OLD drive then remount it after changing the jumper.

The ribbon cable that went to your old hard drive, should have three connectors on it. One on each end and one in between.
IF NOT, YOU WILL NEED A NEW CABLE.
Keeping the one end plugged into either tha card or motherboard, next plug in the NEW drive then plug the OLD drive onto the end of the cable.
NOTE: THE RED STRIPE GOES TOWARD THE POWER CONNECTOR ON THE
DRIVE.
Connect the white power plugs into the hard drives. They are keyed and can only go on one way.
NOTE: You may need a y splitter to split the power cord. If you dont have enough power plugs. If using a splitter, you would ideally want to connect one to a hard drive and the other to a floppy or cd rom. This is because a floppy or cd rom are not always running as much as the hard drives. This just dispenses the power more evenly in your system, I try to only put one power hog on one line out of the power supply ..if possible. If it is not possible, or to difficult, don't sweat it, and hook up both your drives on the same line.
TOUCH THAT CASE. OK, drives are plugged in. Now, turn your computer on.
While it is counting the RAM, press the DELETE key. This will put you into your computers CMOS.
CMOS's look a little different from system to system. But look for something like STANDARD setup or AUTO DETECT HARD DRIVE.

1. If your system has an AUTO DETECT feature. Then auto detect each drive.
2. If not then you must go into the STANDARD setup and enter in the
Cylinders/Heads/Sectors for each of your drives.
3. If you have a 486 or older, you will probably also have to set the LBA mode ON and maybe 32 bit access, and maybe If you have a Pentium, it does it for you. Hopefully!
4. Now press escape and go to save settings and press a return.
5. Insert your boot disc that you made earlier.
6. When your system boots. Type FDISK at the prompt.
7. Now go CREATE partition, and create your partitions on your NEW drive.
This is Drive 1.
IMPORTANT!!
After creating partitions, you must then SET ACTIVE partition 1 on your NEW drive.

This lets the NEW drive be bootable.
THEN ESCAPE OUT. AND REBOOT. LEAVING THE FLOPPY IN THE DRIVE.
This time, when you get to the prompt. type DIR C:, you should get the message that the R>drive is not valid.
NOW:
1. Then type FORMAT C: /S
2. This formats the c drive and install the boot files on it.
3. You should then format the other drive letters if you made a multiple partitioned hard drive.
DO NOT FORMAT YOUR OLD DRIVE. THIS WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF INFORMATION.
4. That is why I always get a DIR of the drive I am about to format FIRST.
5. When it comes back with the INVALID error, then I know the drive letter is safe to format.
6. Now you can reboot, and pull the floppy out this time.
7. Now you two drives should be working together. You can install a new OS on your NEW drive, AND/OR copy the info from your OLD drive.
8. Determine the drive letter of your OLD drive.

1. If it is F: for example. ..Type COPY F:\dos\xcopy.* OR COPY
2. F:\windows\command\xcopy.*
3. Then you could type XCOPY F:\*.* /S
4. This would then copy all files and subdirectories from your OLD drive.
GOOD LUCK! :) If you are going to remove your old drive from your system, Then you need to power down again.
UNPLUG THE OLD DRIVE AND REMOVE IT. Then you might have to change the jumper on you NEW hard drive to MASTER ONLY.
But you MUST reenter the CMOS and change your drive D to NOT INSTALLED.
YOUR SET! Things you may need to purchase when upgrading.....Ribbon cable with three connectors on it, Power plug Y adaptor. And as long as your in there, you may want to buy some compressed air and blow out the dust in your case.
NOTES: An IDE device interfaces with your computer via an IDE channel. One IDE channel can support two IDE devices. (ie. hard drives and CD Roms) Pentiums and even some 486's support two IDE channels. This allows you to have a total of 4 IDE devices. If you need more IDE devices than your computer can support , you will have to buy an extra IDE controller card from someone like GSI.

If you have two IDE hard drives and a cd rom, you will want to have both IDE hard drives on the same IDE channel. This will let the hard drives run at their top speed. If you mix a hard drive and a CD Rom on the same IDE channel, the hard drive will not run at its optimum performance.
PARTITIONING your hard drive:
Keep in mind the following information, when deciding how to partition your hard drive:
FDISK PARTITION SIZE --- Cluster Size
0-127 MB- 2K
128-255 MB- 4K
256-511 MB- 8K
512-1023 MB- 16K
1024-2047 MB- 32K
WHAT THIS MEANS: A hard drive may be partitioned into smaller logical drives. ie. You may have one physical hard drive in your system but if partitioned in two you would see drives C: and D:.
In the chart, as the partition size grows ..so does the cluster size. A cluster is the smallest usable information packet on the drive. An anology , would be to think of clusters as buckets of information. 2K would be like a cup, 8k would be like a bucket, and 32k would be like a garbage can. The size of buckets clusters used depends on the partition size. What happens is that when you use the garbage can size clusters you end up wasting a lot of space. Even if you have a small file or a cups worth of water, you must use the garbage can to hold it.

The end result is that you can waste up to 20% of your disk space by having a 1 gig partition. I would recommend setting the partition sizes

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