ok here we are. my new harddrive came in the post today. 300gig ide maxtor.

i need to install it into my computer, but this will be the first hardware anything i've ever done so im sort of anxious.

basically what do i do? i know that i have to put the hardrive into it's slot and screw it in. then plug in the ide cable.

* but the hardrive is in it's anti-static bag and i dont own one of those earthing gizmos. will i ruin it if i just handle normally, or is there an easy way to earth myself?

* i think the cable running into my current drive has another end on it that i could plug into this hd, or is that not likely. i'm pretty sure i have free ide ports, if so should i buy another cable for the new hd? would a sperate cable be faster?

* i know nothing about slave drives or whatever, i've just heard it said. will the way i plug it in affect how it works in the computer?

thanks in advance

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Dec 31 2005, 03:09 PM

I am sure if you do a search on google you can find all the instruction you will need to format partition you hard drive and then reinstall windows. its actually very simple you can break anything....

With the cable that is going to your present hard drive the way it is plugged in allows for you to add a hard drive to that IDE channel so unless there is not a little extension to that cable (it goes only to you present hard drive) then you will not require a new cable, plus prevent any other complications.

Do not worry too much about the static but there are components on the bottom of the hard drive avoid touching them if at all possible. Handle the hard drive by its sides. Not having a grounding wirst strap and all that is not necessary. To make sure that you are not carrying a static charge after you have turned you PC off and removed the access panel just toughing the chassis will discharge any potential static that might be in your body. So if you are holding the chassis of the PC and the hard drive there is no possiblity of a static charge zapping your hard drive. Truthfully I have never installed anything into a PC and killed it in the process, just be sure that your PC is off completely some motherboards even when turned off still have power going to the mother board, it might require you to unplug the power cord to the PC also to make the light you will see (if any), if you don't see such a light you are probably OK.

If you look carefully at your hard drive you will see three different sections there. One is for you to plug the IDE cable into and will only go in one way. Usually you will have to take the extension that is for the slave hard drive and twist it 180 degrees to plug it in. The cable will only plug into the hard drive one way. If you look closely you will notice a pin missing on the hard drive and if you look at the IDE cable you will see a 'key' and that key would fill the void where the missing pin is. If you were to try to insert the cable in wrong it would not work because the key would hit the pin of the hard drive. The other two sections of the hard drive are the one on the extreme right which is where your power cord will go. The other section has little jumpers on it that tell the drive whether it is to be used as a Master or Slave or possibly CS (not likely). If you look at the hard drive carefully there will be a little diagram that show how to set these jumpers to make your drive either a master or slave.

In you case at this moment you would want to make your new drive a slave so referring back to the diagram of your slave settings set up your new drive as a slave then install it into the PC case and connect you IDE calbe and power calbe (also has a key and will only plug in one way). Power your PC back up and depending one your system (Windows will find the new drive and assign it drive E unless you have to DVDs or CD roms or any combination there of ,then it will assign your new drive as F.

Your new hard drive will not have any information on it so you will have to low level pormat it and get it ready for the PC to use, again I dont know your operating system so that is another topic.

You should be ready for that after you have done the above.

i was just about to do it but i found out i didnt have any screws! and its a bank holiday so the shops are shut. i'l post when its done.

p.s. what is cs on the jumper - just for further knowledge.

Actually, bmx, you don't really *need* the screws for the HD to work. It's simply a safety major, so get them whenever you want.

As for "CS," it means Cable Select. You see, when you connect your HD, you have basically 3 options, it can either be MASTER, SLAVE, or you let the computer decide depending on the current number and condition of HDs and CDs and DVDs present. Personally, I never resort to cable select, since I found it seriously varies from a computer, or even an operating system, to another. So just check the jumper on your original HD, if it's on MASTER, set the jumper on the new one to SLAVE, and vice versa. It'll help if you know a little bit about how to configure the motherboard setup, but it usually works fine.

And about the low level format, I think all the new HDs come formatted already; all you need to do is to setup partitions, you know, like C and D, etc. It's pretty intuitive as well so you shouldn't have a problem, but if you need help, just let us know what operating system you're using (eg., Windows 98, Windows XP, Linux ..)

Let us know how things go :-)

well i put in in just now. i can find it on my system infomation but not in My Computer at the moment. but thats becasue it has no partitions.

im installing it on windows. could you guy's help me partition it? all i want is one big ntfs partition, because im going to partition it further for linux later but i want some of the drive space to be ntfs.

thanks so far.

alright then, organic, it's partition time. :-)

the good thing about you setting up Linux later is that it will handle the Ext2 or Ext3 (which is the filesystem it most commonly uses, much like FAT and NTFS for windows) very flexibly. so let's do what you want now and set up one big fat 300GB partition.

let's open the START menu. choose CONTROL PANEL. double click on ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS. double-click COMPUTER MANAGEMENT.

now a window should be opened up. from the left pane, expand STORAGE and then click on DISK MANAGEMENT.

you probably now will have to choose between a Basic and a Dynamic disk types. choose Basic. don't worry, you're not missing much here, Dynamic has to do with Windows Server 2003, RAID systems and the like.

after that, it gets pretty easy. you'll see your current and your new HDDs. choose the new one. right-click and choose the appropriate command. remember to set it as a Primary partition. then choose the NTFS filesystem, and determine how much of the HDD space you'll allocate. I understand you want the whole 300GB as one partition, which should be fine.

I suppose that's all. oh, and one other thing. if you'll set only one partition, I suggest that, before you set up Linux, do a defragmentation on your partition. normally, Linux will handle everything correctly, but it never hurts to be cautious, now, does it? :-)

good luck

I see these people got to this post before I did . If your HD is going to be the 2nd one make it slave, if it's alone make it master or leave the jumper off which pretty much means it's a stand-alone drive, but don't throw away the jumper, but it on the bottom 2 switches. And where did you get the HD and how fast is it?

its a diamond max 10 and i got it on ebay. 16mb buffer and not sure on spin speed but i guess 7200.

looks like you are not too late on the topic. i seem to have quite a problem. i used the windows disk formatter tool as recomended and it worked away, when it finished [quite a while on 300gig] it told me it had been unsucessful. i dont know why it just plainly said that. so i tried again and the same happened. but after the second time the drive has disappeared to windows, its not in system infomation or in the formatter program.

help - what has gone wrong?

well i rebooted and up came the drive in my computer. i opened it and it asked me to format again. so i did a quick format to see if that would work and it was formatted in a split second.