Hard Drive Installation by Ron Everitt
Hard drive installation is carried out slightly differently depending on whether it is the primary hard drive or if it is a secondary drive.
If there is already a primary C: drive installed the system can be booted on that drive and installation of a second or subsequent drive is fairly straightforward.
If you are setting up a new system it is necessary to have a floppy disk with a suitable system and formatting capability.
This should also have the facility to enable the CD-ROM drive.
Secondary Drive Installation.
The normal motherboard is fitted with two IDE controller connectors each of which will take a cable with two hard drive connectors.
These are labelled Primary and Secondary controllers.
The drives connected to each cable will be described as Master and Slave so we have a Primary Master and Slave and a Secondary Master and Slave.
The Hard drive is configured as Master or Slave normally by setting jumpers on a set of pins located next to the cable connector on the drive.
Most of the new drives have the setting details printed on the face of the drive.
Failing this there will be a leaflet supplied with the drive.
If you have an old drive and cannot find the setting information you should contact the drive manufacturer either by telephone or on their web page.
Set up the drive and connect the power and IDE cable and switch on the system.
Enter the Set-up screen and select the Standard CMOS Set-up.
The hard drive can be set to Auto or alternatively enter the IDE HDD Auto detection set-up.
This cycles through the connected Hard Drives and identifies the characteristics.
Finish by saving the new settings.
The system will now continue its boot-up procedure.
After boot-up click on Start and then Run.
In the Open bar type fdisk and click on OK.
An fdisk Window appears on the screen which will say that the computer has a disk larger that 512 MB and asks you if you wish to enable large disk support? Type Y and Enter The next screen to appear is titled FDISK Options and reads Current Fixed Disk Drive: 1 Choose one of the following:.
1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive.
2. Set active partition.
3. Delete Partition or Logical DOS Drive.
4. Display partition information.
5. Change current fixed disk drive.
Option 5 is only displayed if you have more than one drive.
Below this it says
Enter choice; [1]
Press ESC to exit FDISK
If you have only one drive and this is being set-up then just press 'Enter' otherwise enter 5 to change the drive.
This will then give you a list of drives and sizes connected to the system.

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