How to install 2nd Hard drive in PC?

[Anonymous]

Hello Red Squirrel. You had an excellent article article about installing a hard drive in PC. I would like to install a second hard drive in my PC as I have a spare drive now. How can I add another hard drive on my PC ? I tried to play around with it but got loud beeping sound when i tried to switch on the computer.
Thanks.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1236, old post ID:10920

[rovingcowboy]

well i am not red but i just added in 2 more hd's in my computer.

so let me if i can help you.

first is it a dell computer?? if so then you might not have any luck installing a non- dell hard drive. i did not with my dell. so i did not put one in it. dell computers tend to like everything added in to them, to be stamped with dell's approvall.

now on the the way for other computers.

you need to have a good hd. and since you got beeping errors either your hd was not any good or the ram sticks had been moved to much and were loose, or your second hard drive was formated as the master drive ? or had the jumper set wrong on it.

but it is simple to do you need more hd space, add in an hd. but your mother board should beable to handle it. as in a bus that uses 100 will be able to run the 100 or the 133 ram and ide hd's but if the bus is only able to handle the 133. then you might have trouble putting in a 100 ide hd.

now that you might know but i wanted to say it.

your mother board will need more then 2 ata connections on it if you have one for raid it will work, if not set up for raid. which i found out you dont need for adding in hd's unless you want the new hd to be a copy of the old one.

if you have mother board with only 2 ata connections you will need to get an ata pci connection card. you can get them cheap some places so look around.

but if you only have one hd now and one cdrom now then you dont need to worry about the pci card. just get a gray cable for the hard drive, make sure you have the red stripe on the cable side pluged in to the hd plug closest to the power plug. and look on the mother board where the ata controller is to find out where the number 1 is at on it. it will be a white number on the mb beside the ata controller socket. that number one is the same as the power plug on the hd.. you need to make sure the red stripe on the gray cable is next to the number one.

on the gray cable there are 2 plugs to use one is on the end and one is in the middle. it is the one on the end that should be used first it is the master plug, the computer will see that hard drive as the secondary primary master hd.

now makeing sure you have all the screws tight to hold the hd in the case and it is all plugged in check the ram to see if it is loose.

plug the computer back in to the wall and plug in the keyboard and mouse and all the other stuff you might have unpluged. now leaving the case off for now to test. boot up the computer and see what is going on. if you hear beeps again count them they are a code from the mother board telling you what is wrong. find the book on the mother board and check its pages for the list of errors the beeps are saying.

i hope you dont get any beeps that means trouble.

it should boot up for you. when it does if you can not see the hard drive listed in the windows my computer area.

1 reboot but dont open windows go in to command prompt only.

( how on winxp or winMe i dont know? but on win98 you should beable to get there by pressing the f 5 or f 8 key to get the boot menu.)


2 type in FDISK if it says your set up for larger sectors do you want to use that. and shows you a flashing letter "Y" press y and enter.

3 pick from the list of options to choose from the one that says change hard drive, and press that number

4 it should show you all the hard drives listed pick the one that is the one you just installed. it would be one of the letters " D E F G H " because the drive windows is on is allways drive c, SO NEVER FDISK THAT ONE.

5. after you pick that drive you then follow instructions for that drive for doing the format, always pick the full amount of space on the drive.

6. now you should have blank hd and be ready for you to boot up again so follow the instructions for getting out of fdisk and back to the command prompt,

7 now turn off the power button to the computer wait 30 seconds and turn it back on and let it boot into windows. once windows is open go to my computer area and select the drive you just got which would be just a letter for a name of it.

and you then need to format that new drive so format it. then scan disk it with a complete scandisk to check the drive surface. and then restart the computer again after it is done with the scan disk.

you should be ready then to use the hd.

also win98 will run any hd over 20 gb's in compatibleity mode. but it will work.

if you have a huge drive you might want to make it into a bunch of little ones to do that ask and we can tell you how to do that also. as there are easy ways and hard ways of doing that.



good luck





Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1236, old post ID:10921

[wldkos]

+1 good job roving cowboy.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1236, old post ID:10924

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot for the detailed instructions roving cowboy. I will give it a try again and then post back about my efforts.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1236, old post ID:10980