Installation of a hard disc is done by connecting the hard drive to the motherboard or system board by use of signal cables(data cables). The data cable is a 40 line for IDE and 68 line for SCI, the line number can be identified by the marking on one side of the ribbon cable i.e line number 1 will usually be marked.
How to identify the Pin number on the motherboard connector.
Pin number 1 on the motherboard connector would be identified by a label one or a mark adjacent to the connector. For connectors that do not have labels or marks, the design of the connector is in such a way that the connection can only be done in one way. This is done by designing a connector where line number 20 is not used and therefore Pin number 20 is absent from the connector.
In some cases the arrangement is further enhanced by the design of the connector so that it has a key that would fit into a slot on the motherboard connetor. You can connect two hard disc using one data cable, you can also connect both hard disc and a CD drive on a single IDE cable.
Configuring your Hard disc
After installation of your hard drive it is necessary to configure the drive to enable it stote data. You can configure your drive either as a master or slave. The drive connected to the primary IDE connector will be either be detected as a primary master or a primary slave, whereas drive connected to the secondary drive connector would be detected as secondary master or slave.
The information about drive configuration is usually provided on the drive phase plate. The jumper shorts between different pairs of pins would configure the drive as either master or slave as per the information provided on the drive phase plate.
For some hard disc it is possible to to configure the drive as cable select, when this configuration is done computer will automatically detect one of the drives as a master drive and the other as a slave drive.
Configuration can either be
- Primary master
- Primary Slave
- Secondary master
- Secondary salve
After configuring your hard disc, connect it to the power supply unit with a 4 pin cable.
Hard disc partitioning
Disc partitioning is the creation of portion on the hard disc that act as though they are independent disc. Different operating system will create partition differently for instant other OS creates partitions in the process of of operating system installation. You can also create partition using the disc administrator utility after installation.
Other operating system uses the fdisk utility to partition your hard drive. The fdisk is activated by the following command
A:>fdisk
fdisk menu
- Create partition
- Set partition
- Delete partition
- Display partition information.
When creating a new partition choose option one and follow the screen procedure, if you want to make the newly created partition active choose option 2. To delete the created partition choose option 3, and to display partition infromation choose option 4.
Formating your hard drive
After partition creation you are ready to format your the created partition, use the start up diskette to format the hard disc after which you are ready to use your hard drive.
command: A:> format c:
