Installing brand new master hard drive............ HELP!

Pugwash

Right, I've been looking this up on various pages but most guides are either too vague or stop at screwing in the drive!

I'm confident enough about doing this job myself but just need the right advice to help me.

firstly, what do you do after you screw the thing in. I will hopefully be running it on XP but for the moment it looks like I'll have to make do with win 98. So how do you go about installing an unformatted HD using win 98?

Secondly, Would it be a great deal easier to ues XP to install the drive ie. would it format+partition the drive itself.

thanks for help in advance

lukin

I don't know anything about XP so I won't go there but presuming you are formatting the drive to install Win 98 then you will need a Windows startup disk (any version will do).
First, change your BIOS settings to make your pc boot in this order:
First:Floppy
Second:CD-ROM
Third:IDE-0
After you've done this, stick in the startup disk and restart your pc. After you see A: type "fdisk"
From there you can format your and partition your drive if you follow the instructions.
Once you've done that, take out the floppy,put the Windows disk in the CD drive and restart your machine.
Windows 98 should start installing straight away.

Col_Loki

Ok , firstly the installing -
1) There will be prob around 4-6 spaces for you to mount the H.drive (located under the cd-rom & floppy) choose one and fit the hdrive (4 screws).

2) You then connect the power which is very obvious when you open your case and look at the wires from the power supply.

3) Attach the IDE (data) cable and thats it. - there will be 3 connectors on the cable , one for plugin into the motherboard , one for the slave drive and one for the master drive (only worry about that if u have 2 hard drives)

OK hard drive fitted .

When i installed my drives i had a Windows 2000 cd . This CD is bootable - ie your computer will start from it. Im pretty sure its the same with the XP cd and most lightly the 98.
To get your pc to boot from the CD , go into the BIOS (normally press del when starting up pc) and find "First boot device" , this should be the floppy as standard , change it to the cd-rom drive.
Restart your pc with the CD in the drive.

If it boots from the CD windows will take control of the formatting and install of the OS.
Go with it and fully install (2 hours roughly - incl format).
When its installed, windows will have you in a semi safe mode. This means your graphics will be in 16 colour etc. Just install your graphics card , sound card, mobo ....... and your away with it.
Dont forget to change your 1st boot device back to floppy (not that it matters that much) .

Hope this is a help - gimme a shout if u get stuck.

Pugwash

Cheers lads, I'll definately give this a go when I recieve the drive in the post. :cool:

maxheadroom

Just to confirm, any flavour of XP setup will partition/format the Hard drive for you. Win98 will require that you do this manually before hand, but includes the required tools on the CD. Both CDs are bootable.