How To Install A Hard Drive

Date Written: April 12, 2001
Writen By: Mark Hagan

Don't Forget The BIOS:

Once you have your hard drive installed and everything hooked back up to your case, flip on the power when the screen shows your CPU & memory, press the delete key to go into your BIOS setup. Some computers you press F2 for the setup, generally though it will say somewhere on the screen the key to press.

Once you are at the main BIOS setup screen, it should look something like the picture below.

(Click For Close-Up)

From the main screen you can do one of two things. The easiest is to select the "IDE HARD DRIVE DETECTION" menu choice. This will scan the IDE channels and try to auto detect all your devices. If for some reason it doesn't detect your hard drive correctly (99% of the time it should though), or you want to double check everything, you can go to the "STANDARD CMOS SETUP" which will look like the picture below.

(Click For Close-Up)

From this screen you can set / check your IDE devices. Usually AUTO is the best setting if you don't want to fool around with anything, but you can set it to USER and manually enter in the info (which should be printed on the hard drive itself, or included in a manual).

Once you are done with that, go back to the main BIOS setup screen and chose "SAVE & EXIT SETUP", it will ask you if you are sure you want to save, press Y and the system should reboot.

FDISK The New Drive:

When you are at a DOS prompt, type what you see below and hit enter. FDISK, as discussed in the video, will set the partition type of your hard drive. You can get to FDISK from most any windows boot disk in the windows 9x series. Linux users: use CFDISK. Windows 2000 users, go to the Computer Management program which can be found under the Administrative Tools folder. From that program, go to Storage, then Disk Management and configure it from there.

The next window you are faced with asks you if you want to use partition sizes over 512MB. Unless you are using an older computer, you will want to hit "Y", then "Enter" at this screen. You can read the details in the image above.

This is the main menu of FDISK. From here you can do everything that you will need to do in order to get your drive up and running. First on the menu is "Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive" If this is your only hard drive and you plan to install a windows operating system, hit "1" then "Enter". If you want to create a Linux partition, you will most likely have to use CFDISK OR MFDISK for Linux. (both come with most distributions.) If you added a second hard drive, then there will be a fifth menu choice which is to select the actual hard drive you want to partition. Select 5, then choose the appropriate number for the hard drive you want to configure (it will be obvious because the new hard drive will be the one that is showing that it isn't partitioned).

In the picture above are your options when you select to create a new partition. You will most likely want to select the first option (by pressing the "1" key followed by "Enter".) This will give you the option to use the maximum amount of space for the partition or let you input the size manually you wish to use.

If everything went correctly and you hit "4" when at the main menu screen, you should see at least one drive on the list with a Letter followed by a colon. In our case we have "C:" which is probably what you will have also. This lets us know that our drive creation was successful. (Partition 1 & 2 are for Linux on this hard drive, that is why they show up as Non-DOS) Now all we have to do is format. Use the following screen as a format guideline:

Note that you will type in the drive letter of the actual drive you want to format, be careful not to format your existing drive if you are adding in a second hard drive! That's it! If you have any questions or comments, please send them to Mark.

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