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"New Hard Disk"

Hi I am getting a new hard drive for my PC as I need more storage space, will it just work straight from the box? or should I format it first? this will be a second hard drive. I already have two but the 2nd one at the moment is tiny so I will remove that one and replace it with this new one.

No worries*



*invoice is in the post

Many thanks the new disk is now in and working! your instructions for FDISK were spot on and helped me brilliantly so once again thanks its very much appreciated!

Its comming today so as my shifts work out I am at home all day today so today I will try and see if a can get this new disk in and running! should be a challenge, stand by for the crys of HELP :-)

Ok that sounds fairly straight forward its due to be delivered on Friday morning, so I may re post on this thread on saturday morning for major help! if all else fails he he as I am working on Friday night, so it will be Saturday before I can get in to it. Many thanks

Shelljed wrote:
> am hoping that I will install it as a slave, and that windows
> will pick it up as a D drive and that all I need to do is format it,
> sounds to easy!

Sorry, you will need to use fdisk unless it has a partition there already. If it's a new drive, it won't have.


Having said that, FDISK is not all that hard to use. When you have a second hard disk present there should be a fifth option, which lets you change the target drive. Select this first, and select your new drive - from then on this will be the focus of all the changes you make in FDISK. When it drops you back to the main menu display drive information (option 4, from memory) to verify that the target is the new drive (you should see no partitions listed there). Assuming you just want one logical drive (i.e. D:) to occupy all the space on your disk, select the Create Partition option from the menu (Option 1 or 2?), then create a primary partition and set the size to the size of the disk. Exit, reboot and you're away (once you format the drive inside Windows).

I have a boot disk for Widows 98 Ok so worst case is that I may need to do FDISK, thats what a was dreading, so hopefully I may not need to? am hoping that I will install it as a slave, and that windows will pick it up as a D drive and that all I need to do is format it, sounds to easy! if a needed to do FDISK on it how would I do that? I know how to get in to FDISK options and that you are presented with 4 options but after that....its a minefield!

If you know about setting the jumper to slave you will at least be able to install the drive. Alas you will probably have to fdisk + format it too. I don't honestly recall whether Windows 98 comes with DOS tools that let you create a partition, so you might have to boot off a floppy disk and use FDISK (you should be able to format it from inside Windows though). You can get Windows 98 bootdisk images from bootdisk.com: [URL]http://www.bootdisk.com[/URL]

Hi I am quite PC litterate OK its Windows 98 SE it actually has two hard drives in just now I installed the second one myself but its tiny one only 2GB the original hard drive is 40GB and my new one is 40GB it will be a brand new hard disk so a was not sure if a had to do some thing with it before I used it i.e Format it? or worse still run FDISK? The old 2GB drive came from an old PC and all I did with it was change the jumper setting to slave, popped it in did a format from DOS and it worked fine.

So what a think am needing to know is once I have installed the new disk as a slave and connected the cables and power supply will I need to do a format or fdisk? to get the new disk up and running.

If I recall correctly you run Windows 98, from which I infer you're computer may be quite old. The problem with quite old computers is that there's often a limit to the size of hard disk that the motherboard and/or supports. The bad news is that I would expect problems if the new disk is over about 30GB and certainly if it's over 140GB (depending on exactly how old your computer is). The good news is that the hard disk will almost certainly still work, although your motherboard and/or operating system will only be able to use X amount of the total space available.

To help us better advise you: what size hard disk are you thinking about getting, what is the Operating System on the computer you're installing it into, and how old is the computer? If you're not sure how old it is, what processor it has is a good indication.

Finally, do you know about master/slave devices, and primary/secondary channels?

It will need formatting to the filesystem you want - NTFS or FAT32 if you're a Windows chap.

Do you know how to install a hard drive, or do you want some tips on that? As long as you get the right cables in the right place it's easy, and there are only 2 wires.