Hard drive help

[BLAZERONE22]

How tough is it to install a new hard drive in my PC? Mine just died. I've never eally tore into a pc before. Is it just a matter of plugging a new one in? thanks

[ATCnut]

The physicall installation of the hard drive is not difficult. You have to unplug two cables from the old one, take out a few mounting screws, and put the new one in its place.

The more difficult part is rebuilding the operating system on the new drive. Are you sure that the old drive is physically damaged? Or does it just need a complete clean reload. To do a reload you need the CDs for all your software

[BLAZERONE22]

I tried to reload it but it says No drive installed. So I'm thinking its toast.

[ATCnut]

A couple of things to check. You need to go into the BIOS and check the controller setup. When your PC first boots, there should be a message something like "Hit F2 to enter setup". Perform the requred action, and check the controller setup. If this has gotten changed, the drive will not show up.

What OS are you running? You also need to check FDISK (or the equivelent for your OS)

Another thing to check is the cables to the drive. Unplug and plug back in both ends of the data cable (flat ribbon) and the power cable.

[BLAZERONE22]

thanks I tried the first 2 I have not checked the cables though. I give that a shot.

[86waterpumper]

What kind of system you are putting the drive on makes alot of difference, for example, I can't just go buy a 120 or 200 gig drive and put it on a four or five year old system, because the bios will limit the size. Old Bioses might see up to 8 gig drives, then there was a 32gb barrier on some of them, however if your system isn't that old, you shouldn't too many problems. If it is a older pc, than what might happen is that the system will see the drive up to the limit and only use that much of it. You might have to invest in a promise pci controller, to bypass the onboard ide connections. These cards aren't much, I think they run about 15 or 20 bucks at most. Hook the drive up, and make sure the jumpers are set right, most times you will simply want to set the jumper to master, and put it on the primary ide channel, but some drives like the western digitals are weird, and actually have to be jumpered for nothing at all for some systems to see them as the master drive, even though the instructions will tell you different. ATCnut is right, you will need a windows disk to reload your operating system, and if it's windows 98, then format it to fat 32 with the windows 98 bootup disk then load off the cd. If it's 2000 or xp or something, then the operating system cd itself will allow you to format the drive in either fat32 or ntfs. I reccomend using ntfs as it is a better filesystem I think for various reasons. If your system had a 5400 rpm drive or something before, and you upgrade to a 7200 rpm, then you will see a good performance boost as well. I don't know what to tell anyone these days as far as what brands to buy, it seems to me they are all going to pot, and noone is offering a long warranty anymore. Alot of people these days seem to like The western digital drives, and they are pretty fast, some like maxtor drives. On storage review they say that the best drives as far as life expectanty go are the samsung spinpoints, but they are slower at 5400 rpm. Whatever you do, stay away from IBM drives, their quality has gone through the floor. Good luck!

P.s. usually a totally hosed drive will make some nice racket, or funny motor sounds if it's really gone. If the drive is found in the bios on a autodetect, and just won't load windws or something, if it's just got bad sectors, then I would determine what brand harddrive it was, and then go to the manufacturers website, and there download a diagnostic program that can be run off the floppy, which will tell you if the drive has a problem

[BLAZERONE22]

Hmmm, my computer just froze and then would not reload, even with the startup disk.

[86waterpumper]

what does it do when you reboot it, does it just count the memory and hang, or what error does it give? Usually hard freezes are caused by a flaky component such as bad memory or motherboard, or by heat issues.