How do you want it?

Your New Hard Disk and You

You just went out and got yourself a new hard drive, so now what? You are all ready to slap that puppy in there and starting reinstalling all of your games using the "MASSIVE" install options now that you have a ton of disk space right? Not so fast Geronimo, think about what you are doing first. Now that you have the new disk, you have to put some thought into how you actually want to install it.

First you have to physically install the drive into the computer, and then you have to think about what you are going to do with your old data. There are three primary ways to install your new HDD, which way is the best for you will be determined by your needs. Here are the three most common ways to install the new hard disk

• Leave the old drive alone and install the new drive as a slave.


• Copy the data from the old drive, and make the old drive a slave.


• Copy the data from the old drive, and remove the old drive totally.

Different circumstances will dictate which installation method you use. The physical installation of the hard disk is also going to be impacted by your preferred installation method, so pick an option from the list above and decide on that before you install the drive into the computer case. The question you have to ask yourself is why are you installing the new drive? Are just looking to add more storage capacity, or is your existing disk starting to fail on you? If you just need more storage space you should just add the new drive as a slave, but if your current drive is starting to fail you'll have to setup your new drive as the master and copy over all of the old data from the old drive.

IDE Jumpering

Before you mount the drive inside the case, you should set the drives jumpers while they are still easily reachable. Nothing is more annoying that getting that hard disk mounted and then finding out later that you incorrectly set a jumper, and can't reach it to change the thing without removing the drive. I've done this. C'mon Ed-, I KNOW that you have too. Fess up!

(Eh… no comment. -Ed.)

The master and slave jumper settings should be clearly marked on the drive itself. Each IDE channel can have one master and one slave, and most motherboards only have two IDE channels. If you are adding an additional drive to a booting system, set the new drive as a slave, and make sure the existing drive is correctly jumpered as a master.

Many factory settings have hard disks jumpered to be the single device on an IDE channel. This might be confusing because this jumper setting is often neither master nor slave. If you choose to add a second device to the same IDE channel such as a CD-ROM or another hard disk, you have to make sure one device is set to master, and the other is set to slave.