Physical Installation Tips

Physical Installation

Locate a place inside your case to mount the new drive. More often than not, you will find an open 3.5" internal bay that the new drive will fit in happily, but space isn't the only consideration. You will also want to consider the physical location of the drive itself, and will most likely want to mount it as near as you can to the existing hard disk (if one is in the system already) so you can be sure that the IDE cable is going to reach both drives, otherwise you will need to get a longer IDE ribbon. Usually cables come precut in 18", 24" and 36" lengths with dual connectors to support two drives. 18" is the most common ribbon length used, so try to avoid placing the drive in the case in such that way that would necessitate using a longer cable.

If you don't have any free 3.5" bays for the hard disk, then you can purchase a set of drive rails/brackets to mount the hard disk in a free 5.25" bay. This is usually a last ditch location since putting a drive all the way up there usually necessitates the need for a longer cable.

Keep It Straight

When installing your drive(s), you should try to avoid twisting the cable if you can help it. The drive cables are in a ribbon form for a reason, and that is to minimize crosstalk. If you start twisting the ribbon around itself you run the risk that, while remote, can cause signaling problems between the computer and hard disk. It's for this reason that I recommend that you NOT make/use the so-called "round" cables. A "round" cable is a ribbon cable that has been cut into sections and wrapped with tape. In my own studies so far, I've seen no reasonable cooling benefits to using "round" cables at all, and it totally defeats the purpose of the ribbon form cable in the first place, which is to prevent signal "crosstalk" between the wires by keeping them away as far apart as you can.

Also try to avoid creasing the cables. I've seen plenty of people do this trying to obtain a neat appearance to the system. Don't get me wrong, neat is good, but creasing the cable is not. You run the risk of damaging the conductors inside the cable, which will either render the cable useless, or adversely affect your hard disk's performance. The 80 conductor DMA/66 cables are more tolerant of this since they are "stiffer", but even still, don't crease them down, if you need to fold them a little, that is fine, just don't crease.

Boot it up

Once you have the drive physically mounted in the system and connected, double check that you have the drives jumpered and cabled correctly, then power up the system. The drives should be automatically detected by the system on boot up, if they are not, then something is wrong. Go back and check your cables and jumpers.

First, boot the system and verify that it is correctly identifying the hard drive(s). Boot to a DOS prompt by pressing and holding the F8 key until it displays the windows startup menu (If you reach the Windows splash page, you missed your opportunity.) Choose "Safe Mode Command Prompt Only". If you are installing clean, then you will have to use a boot disk to start the system up. Booting from a boot disk will take you right to the DOS prompt.