Installing Hard Drive

[mitch]

The configuration depends on what you are going to have in your system..
Adding a second hard drive is pretty easy... If you have an existing hard drive that will be set to Master (by a pin setting on the back of the drive) and it should be on the Primary IDE... If you are doing to add a second drive where you put it depends on what you already have..

You could do this set up...
Primary Master.. Hard Drive (with operating system)
Primary Slave.... Hard Drive (storage)

Secondary Master .... CD Rom..

If you have a burner then this changes things some think its not such a good idea to have the CD and Burner on the same IDE it can cause problems with burning on the fly... So you could do something like this...

Primary Master.. Hard Drive (with operating system)
Primary Slave.... CD Rom..

Secondary Master .... Burner
Secondary Slave ...... Hard Drive (storage)

Nowadays with the newer burners it really shouldn't be a problem so you could have this set up

Primary Master.. Hard Drive (with operating system)
Primary Slave.... Hard Drive (storage)

Secondary Master .... Burner
Secondary Slave ...... CD Rom..


The Master and Slave settings are done by a jumper pin on the back of the device.. It will have.. Master... Salve... Cable Select and sometimes Auto... Use the jumper pin to set the device to what you want..
On newer boards I think the Primary one is usually blue.. (it should be labeled)
If I am setting the device to Master I try to use the first connector from the board on the IDE cable and use the last connection for the Slave device.. (sometimes this makes a difference and its good practice)

If you have more than four IDE devices.. you will need to get a PCI ATA card.. This will allow for up to four more devices to be installed...

Just remember if the drive is new you will probably have to format and or partition it before you can use it.