Installing New Hardware in your PC
Computer Hardware
One of the things is a jumper on hard drive, its location needs to be changed from Master to Slave if the one you have is master, and leave it as it is if not. It is not required during the installation of SATA drives.
It really does not matter whether it is a SATA or IDE drive as the process for installation is entirely the same. Various cables will be accompanied for connecting the drive to the motherboard, but ensure a safe and secure place for the drive. In addition to this, avoid touching panels, circuits and other cables to greater extent in the tower. Make sure to connect the data cable first followed by power supply connection.
Keep an eye during installation as hard drives are highly sensitive hardware.
Then you should start your computer system and immediately enter BIOS to see if your drive is recognized or no, as occasionally it can do so automatically, else certain options need to be changed manually to let BIOS detect the presence of the component.
One thing to be known is that the drives are formatted at low level initially, so you have to do the high level formatting yourself before you actually start using it. After your system has completed the booting, open the “My Computer” and locate the new drive there. Then place the pointer of the mouse on that drive’s icon and right click. Select the tools option and click on Format. From the file system options, choose the NTFS file format and click on start option. Leave the computer in working mode only and wait for it to get over as this may take sometime in case of drives with large storage capacity.
Once finished with this, you can restart you computer system and then locate the new drive. Addition of new drives may result in changed letters for other existing drives. This is an in-built process and may be required to be done, so you need not be confused with this.
If you have FAT32 file system in use, then you may face some problems while installing the drives with bigger storage capacity (e.g. 120 Gb or more), the system, at times, may not identify them. But the service pack 2 can surely come to rescue, or updating your BIOS can help solving this problem, if the motherboard of your system is quite old. Also you can check the connecting cables again to ensure that everything is at right place. Again reboot your system and enter BIOS to check if the device is identified this time or no, the boot disk may also be required which can be downloaded too. But before installing the new drive as a slave one, you need to format it.
If it still does not work, then the best thing to do is get some external technical service, or online support services that can analyze your problem and get fix it in almost negligible time if you cannot solve it yourself.
