I wish to install a second hard disk (Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200G) into my system. The existing: disk is an 80G.

Pleas describe the procedure to go through, I want to do the right things.

I use Windows XP Home.

(Originally posted February 2006)

Graeme Tyers, Mansfield, VIC

Good question!

Here's a ‘check list’ for people confronted with this task for the first time:

1. Determine what ‘type’ of drive it is. The physical procedures differ for IDE drives and for SATA drives.
2. Install the drive physically in the system, ensuring that the correct procedures are followed for configuring and connecting it.
3. Start the PC and, if the drive is not already partitioned formatted and available for use via ‘My computer’, then use the ‘Disk Management’ feature of Windows XP to ready it for use. This support section document from Seagate provides an excellent illustrated step-by-step guide to using the feature and performing the task.

Sounds rather straightforward, doesn’t it? Let’s have a look at the differences in fitting IDE drives and SATA drives. (We use the terms "Drive" and "Disk" interchangeably in this description.)

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Fitting an IDE drive.

You need to locate a spare IDE connector to attach to the drive. Most PC;s have two IDE ‘channels’ available on the motherboard. Some have more, which can be used for stand-alone drives or for extra drives in RAID arrays. Each ‘channel’ will have a corresponding IDE socket on the mainboard for the data cable to be plugged in to, and each socket and data cable can handle two drives.

On the rear of the hard drive, near the power connector socket and data cable socket you’ll also find the ‘jumper block’, as illustrated in this image from Seagate.



If the data cable is connected to two drives then one must be set as ‘Master’ and the other set as ‘Slave’. We suggest you avoid using the ‘Cable Select’ option wherever possible, have the ‘Master’ drive connected to the end connector of the data cable and the ‘Slave’ drive attached to the middle connector.

Alter the drive jumper if necessary, fit it to a spare drive bay, connect up the data cable and power cable, and that’s it for hardware installation, really. (Make sure that you use an ’80-wire’ drive cable, rather than a ’40-wire’ one. Modern hard drives require their use!)

Check the BIOS POST screens at startup to verify that the drive is recognized by your system’s BIOS and, if it isn’t, check in BIOS Setup to make sure that the IDE channel you have the drive connected to isn’t set to ‘disabled’.

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Fitting a SATA drive.

SATA drives don’t ‘daisy-chain’ on data cables, so there’s no jumper setting changes to worry about. Simply attach the data cable and power cable connector and away you go!

Again, if the SATA controller channel isn’t enabled in BIOS setup you’ll need to make the appropriate change there.

Some older motherboards with provision for SATA hard drives may not have a full ‘native SATA controller’ included, and may require the installation of a suitable device driver in Windows before the drive can be used. Motherboards with earlier VIA chipsets are rather ‘notorious’ for this, but you may find others also. If your system BIOS identifies the drive at startup, but Windows Disk Management is unable to find it, then this will be the reason. The necessary SATA controller driver will be available for download on the motherboard manufacturer website, if you don’t already have it on an installation CD.

There you go. The ‘Beginner’s guide to fitting a second hard drive’. Anyone having problems after following it can feel free to send a specific question to us. If you do, please be sure to include details of the make and model number of both the motherboard and the hard drive.

(Also see these other HelpStation questions for more information.)

Cheers,

Terry O'Shanassy