How to Install a Computer Hard Drive

As computer programs become larger, people with older computers often find themselves running out of space. Sometimes it's better to migrate your data to a newer computer but often, especially for office computers, it's better just to put a new hard drive in and continue to use your original machine.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Determine if you have enough connections and space for your new hard drive. A hard drive requires an open 3 1/2-inch drive bay, a power connection and either an open IDE or SATA connection, depending on the type of drive.

2. Set the drive's jumpers. Not all hard drives have jumpers. If your drive doesn't have an,y then you can safely skip this step. If it does, then your drive won't work without the correct settings. If you set both drives on an IDE cable to "Cable Select," then your system should work fine. If you're having trouble with Cable Select (or don't want to use it), you need to set the drive at the end of the IDE cable to "Master" and the one in the middle to "Slave."

3. Screw your hard drive into the open drive bay.

4. Connect your power cable and your IDE or SATA cable to the drive. You can only plug power, SATA and most IDE cables in one orientation, but occasionally, you can plug IDE cables in two different ways. If that is the case, then the red stripe on the side of the IDE cable goes towards the power connector.

5. Boot up your computer and make sure your computer recognizes the drive.

Tips & Warnings

• The Master/Slave relationship can cause a lot of problems. If your computer simply won't recognize the drive, try changing the jumpers or the drive's placement on the IDE cable, especially with older computers.
• SATA drives are much easier to set up than IDE. If you have a choice between the two, choose SATA.