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Upgrade 101-1 — Installing a Hard DriveToronto Star Fast Forward Upgrade 101 series part 1 for September 23/99
Preparation and cautions (READ THIS FIRST)
This begins a brand new series of articles you'll find each week in Fast Forward for the next 11 or more weeks. In it, we're going to take an older PC and slowly upgrade it - adding components and replacing others, complete with step-by-step instructions, tips, and traps to avoid. Where there are common errors to make, we'll also provide a basic trouble-shooting guide for each procedure. Our intent is to include some minimal shopping tips for replacement parts, together with a price range, and to give some guide to the difficulty of each procedure. Some will be simple tasks that anyone can do with minimal risk to your existing system - or to your sanity. Others will be more difficult and you may decide that it makes more sense to have the vendor who sells you the component do the installation, even if that costs more (and the installation will have a warranty, too). However, if you think you have to be a rocket scientist to work inside a computer, think again. All that's required is care and caution. There are only a few ways to hurt the computer and even fewer to hurt yourself - and we'll tell you how to avoid them Because this is the first article in the series, we're going to provide some extra information that will be common to all of the tasks, such as the tools to use, the precautions to take, and more. You'll want to keep these hints, because we simply don't have the space available to repeat them in depth each week. We'll deal with the most popular upgrade and maintenance tasks, such as cleaning a mouse and inside the computer's case, adding a new hard drive, adding more memory, and upgrading graphics and sound controllers. Some of the procedures, such as adding external peripherals (printers, etc.) will be dead simple. But we'll also venture into wild country with items on home networking, upgrading CD-ROM to CD-RW (rewritable) or DVD (digital video disc) drives, replacing processors and ultimately, replacing an entire motherboard. This may not cover all the items you'd like, but if we receive enough requests to add a specific upgrade task, we may get back to this later in the winter. We're going to start with a common task, adding a new hard drive to an existing computer, while keeping the old one. On a scale of 1 (not difficult, you don't have to open the case) to 4 (maybe you'd rather not do this yourself), this is about a 3 (some homework required before and after shopping, requires opening the case, and, depending on the make and model of your computer, possibly disassembling large parts of the chassis). In other words, it's a little complicated, but you can't do any lasting harm to your system or to yourself. Before you go shopping.
Last, but by no means least, do you know the brand and model of the hard drive you have now? At some point you're going to need to know this and if you have no manual for the drive (not unusual), you may want to remove it to have a closer look at the label that's normally mounted on its top flat surface. Removing a Drive
Back to InstallationOkay, button the case up - be careful not to pinch any data cables between the case and the chassis - then fire up your computer and invoke the BIOS setup (see your manual and read the precautionary sidebars). In the hard drive section, it would be good if the BIOS says "Auto." That means it's likely to be able to figure out your new drive's characteristics without you having to know things like the number of cylinders, heads and sectors per track (CHS) it uses. If the BIOS has these CHS settings detailed for your existing drive, you may have a problem. It may be too old to handle today's larger capacity drives. You may want to check with the system manufacturer and you'll definitely want to talk this over with the vendor of the hard drives. This may be a good time to consider having the vendor install your new drive. ShoppingYou can pay anywhere from under $200 to over $500 for a new hard drive with typical capacities between 1.2 and 45 GB. Price will be determined by the drive's generic type (see sidebar: ATA v/s SCSI), its performance characteristics (see sidebar: advanced terminology) and, frankly, who made it. Most popular brands (in no particular order) in today's market include Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Quantum, Fugitsu, and IBM. There are others. You want a drive that works in your existing system. Discuss its type (PC, Mac, 486, Pentium, G3, iMac, etc.) and its age - and the identity of the drive you have now - with the vendor, as well as your operating system and which flavour of it you have. Otherwise, if you get it home and it is unsuitable, that's your fault. You reveal the identity of the drive you have now (brand and model), because all other things being equal, some drives simply won't work if certain other drives are present. You reveal the system's type and age because newer drives won't often work with systems that are too old (made before the new ATA standards arrived, for example). If the drive you're eyeing is over 8.4 GB in capacity and your system isn't nearly new, you'll more than likely require a BIOS update so that it can see all the space available. If you've discussed all these things with the vendor and s/he assures you the drive will work in your system, get that assurance written on the invoice - then you have something to discuss if it doesn't work. Otherwise you're at the mercy of the vendor's good will. Last, but not least, newer ATA drives using the UltraDMA 66 standard won't perform to that level of performance unless your motherboard chipset explicitly supports this new standard. (See below: ATA v/s SCSI.) Instead, it will fall back to UltraDMA 33 or may not work at all. Advanced hard drive terminology. When you're shopping for a new hard drive, paying attention to some of the technical specs will help you make up your mind (and also affect cost). For example: Rotation speed: How fast the drive spins its platters will have an overall effect on other performance ratings. In today's market, your three main choices are 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM and 10,000 RPM. Cost tends to rise with the rotational speed, but so, too, does the noise level. For example, Seagate's 10K RPM Cheetahs are very nimble, but are reputed to be on the "very" side of noisy. Average Access: measures how quickly the drive finds and reads data on the drive's surface. Usually expressed in milliseconds (ms) and smaller numbers indicate faster drives. This spec is actually composed of two measurements: Seek time (how quickly the drive head, in conjunction with the disk's rotational speed, finds data at random on the disk surface) and latency (how quickly the drive head, once the data is found, actually acquires it). In today's market, 8 ms or less is fast; while 12 or more ms is slow. Throughput or data transfer rate: This spec can be misleading unless the manufacturer also indicates where it was measured. A drive's internal transfer rate is much higher than the speed with which data gets outside the drive and into your system where you can make use of it (external or I/O transfer rate). Measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB) per second. Higher numbers indicate better performance. However, keep in mind that hard drives normally produce two rates and that the one quoted to you (if both aren't mentioned) is usually the "Burst transfer rate" which is higher rather than the "Sustained transfer rate" which is less. Ultra DMA/33 v/s Ultra DMA/66: There's a fuller discussion of what this term means elsewhere, but here are a couple of points to keep in mind. To get the full transfer rate from your brand new Ultra DMA/66 drive, your system's motherboard chipset must support this standard. Otherwise, you'll fall back to the Ultra DMA/33 limit. If your system is even older, you may have some difficulty using the drive at all, so work closely with the vendor to make sure you get a suitable drive for your system. Capacity: These days it's measured in gigabytes (GB). The industry is usually pretty good about telling us the actual capacity of the drive when we're ready to use it, but if there's no mention of whether the quoted capacity of the drive is formatted or unformatted, start asking tougher questions. The formatted capacity will always be less than the unformatted capacity. Drives over 8.4 GB: If you have an older system, you may not be able to use a drive larger than 8.4 GB. Talk to your vendor about what you have before you buy. Even if your system is relatively new, it may not find all of the space available on a drive larger than 8.4 GB. For example, when I added a 17.6 GB drive to my four year-old Dell this past spring, I had to update its BIOS before the system could recognize the larger capacity. Installing.If you're adding a new hard drive to a system that already has one, you'll probably (but not necessarily) need to make some changes to the existing drive before either one will work. If you have the manual for the existing drive, that's good. If you don't, try the manufacturer's Web site. All of the sites I've checked for the brands listed above have pages that describe the proper settings for their drives (although some make you dig harder for the information than others). In all cases mentioned above, the Web address is www.<companyname>.com If this doesn't work, hope the information you need is on a label on the top of the drive (see sidebar - removing a drive). Otherwise you're going to have a problem you'll have to solve - either by phoning the drive manufacturer's tech support or hoping that the vendor of your new drive has some documentation somewhere that reveals the secret.
Your existing drive, assuming it's the only one in the system and is an ATA type (see ATA v/s SCSI), is currently set as the "Master" (denoting that it's the first in the data chain) and it has likely been told it's the only drive in the system. On the back or underside of the drive will be a set of pins with small plastic jumper blocks shorting out one or more pairs of pins. The information you're seeking is how to set these jumpers so that you can tell the drive that it's no longer alone and (depending on what happens later), that it's either the master or the slave (I didn't invent these terms, so please don't yell at me). If you get the information for the drive and discover that the jumpers are set to "cable select." breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone. If you cannot find the information you need, don't start moving the jumpers without documentation - there are so many possible settings that you'll never get it right - and may forget what they were originally (that's bad). You may have to consider replacing the drive instead of adding a new one. Stop now and back up its contents. If your existing drive is a SCSI drive, you'll still have to figure out what its "SCSI ID" is. If your SCSI adapter came with setup software, you should be able to list your existing SCSI devices and have it report their ID numbers (and I've never seen a SCSI adapter that didn't come with this type of software - but if you have one, talk to your vendor about getting some software to do the job). Under the hoodRead the preparation sidebars carefully, then come back. Pay attention to all of the precautions to take before opening the case. In addition to getting the case sides off, you'll probably have to get the case front off, too. I could try to describe how to do this, but frankly, there are about as many ways as there are different case designs. I sure hope you have your manual handy. First off, you'll need to be able to see both sides of the drive bay. In most generic systems, both sides of the case will come off and you'll be able to do this fairly easily. In name-brand systems, this may be more of a problem. Several companies require the drive bay to be removed before you can work on it. Dell's earlier Dimension models, for example, have one that swings out, then falls into your hand. Again, please consult your system manual if the way to get at the bay isn't obvious. Before you disconnect anything, make notes on what you see. There are two items connected to your existing drive - a flat, usually gray, data cable and a white power plug. The data cable leads to your motherboard. If your system is so old that it leads to a circuit board connected to the motherboard, instead, stop. A new, modern drive probably won't work in your system. Take it to the vendor. The exception here is if you're installing a SCSI (small computer systems interface) hard drive instead of an ATA hard drive (see sidebar - ATA v/s SCSI), in which case, the cable will lead to a circuit board.
The white power plug, connected by multi-coloured wires to the system's power supply, may be about 3/4 of an inch wide (a "Molex" connector), or a narrower (just under a half-inch wide) connector. If it's the wider of the two types, note that it has two sharp edges and two beveled edges corresponding to a similar shape on the drive's power socket. It's difficult but not impossible if you press hard enough, to push this plug in upside down (ask me how I know). Don't. You won't like it and neither will the drive. Remember that slow, steady pressure is all you ever use.
Now examine the data cable. It should have a spare connector approximately half-way between the motherboard and your existing drive. It's normal, but not necessary, for your old drive to be on the connector farthest from the motherboard (and if it's set to cable select, it will definitely be there). Do whatever you'd planned to do to dump static now. Take the new drive out of its anti-static packaging. Examine it to see if there are any clues about which side of its data port is the "pin one" side. It's often the side closest to the power socket, but this isn't an absolute rule. You may find numbers silk-screened on the underside of the drive or a picture on a label (or if you've been a really good person in this life, there may even be a manual in the box). Slide the new drive into the empty drive bay you've chosen. Don't tighten any screws yet. See if the second connector on the data cable will reach when the pin one edge is lined up properly with the drive's data port. It reaches? Good. It doesn't? Oh, oh. Do you have another empty bay that works better? How about if you move the CD-ROM drive and use a wider 5.25-inch bay instead? At this point you have some options, including getting a longer cable (back to the store), or if you have to use a wider bay - either to get the cable to fit or because you don't have a free 3.5-inch bay, getting a drive converter cradle to hold the drive securely in the wide bay. Once you've got all this sorted out, remove the new drive again and (depending on whether it's an ATA or SCSI type), either set the jumpers properly to denote that this drive is a slave or set the SCSI ID to an unused number (see above). If your existing ATA drive's jumpers were set to "cable select," that means your BIOS is up-to-date enough to detect whether a drive is a master or a slave depending on its position on the data cable. In this case, the drive at the end farthest from the motherboard is the master and the drive using the middle connector is the slave. Set your new drive to "cable select" and thank modern technology. Otherwise, set it to indicate that a) it's one of two drives in a system and b) that it's the slave. Why can't I put the new drive in as the master? Well, you can. However, you now have to change the old drive to slave status or, if it's set to cable select, move it so it can reach the second connector. Even if this is not a problem, there is another little trap here. Hard drives, during their spin-up, eventually announce to the system that they are ready to go. The time from the beginning of this little exercise to the "ready" declaration is, according the ATA-2 and later specification, four milliseconds. However, not all drives start counting at the same place. And older drives are usually slower to power up than newer drives are. The new drive, if set as the master, fires up, declares ready, then goes looking for the second drive. If it doesn't find it within that 4 ms window, it declares the second drive missing and you get a message that says "drive not found" - and it doesn't search again. I've had this happen so often that I now add newer drives as slaves by default. That way, the newer drive is ready when the slower old drive goes looking for it - and the problem goes away. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to put the new drive as master just in case it works. It depends on how mismatched the two drives are. Okay. We have all appropriate jumper settings (or SCSI IDs) set for all drives. Slide both drives into their bays. Connect them to their power connectors, then attach the data cable connectors (or the other way around - whichever is easiest to work with in the cramped workspace). Try to get the "pin one" edge of the cable connector aligned properly with the drives' data ports (but if you have to guess, go for it - reversing the data cable won't hurt anything but your pride). Let's hope your new drive came with screws in the box to attach it to the bay so it won't move around. While we're here, we should also note that hard drives don't particularly care whether they're mounted horizontally or vertically, so long as they aren't on an angle or upside-down. Locate the appropriate holes in the bay sides. No matter what brand of drive you bought, you should find a way to line up four holes on the drive with four holes on the bay. It's quite normal to use only three screws, however, two on one side and one on the other. Insert the screws and tighten them gently until the drive is secure. If necessary, remount the drive bay. Otherwise, go on to the next step. Don't button up the case sides yet. Setup - Getting the system to recognize the driveFire up the system. Invoke setup. There will be a delay while the BIOS finds and identifies the new drive. At this point, you may have to do some or all of the following: If the BIOS finds and correctly identifies the new drive, reporting all of the space available, that's good. See below under formatting and partitioning. If the BIOS has to be told there's another drive, do whatever you have to do for it to know that there is a drive to be found. With a modern BIOS and hard drive, all you should have to do is to change the setting for the appropriate drive from <none> to <Auto>. Restart the system. If a drive is reported as not present, you get a message that says HDD controller failure, or HDD not found (or something similar), then it's likely a data cable or power connector problem. Power the system down. Make sure that both the data cable and power connectors are firmly seated in their respective sockets (sometimes they fool you). If both are firmly seated, then the problem is most likely a "pin one" mismatch with the data cable. If you had to remove the data cable from both the motherboard and the drives, change only one connector at a time until the problem goes away and the BIOS finds the drive. If nothing works, it's possible that during all the twisting and turning, the cable went to heaven. Try another cable before tearing your hair out (if you do this a lot, you'll probably wind up with spares and given that these cables aren't expensive, it's not a bad idea). If you installed the new drive as the master and made your old drive the slave, reverse this, then try again. Try the new drive by itself (set as master and on the appropriate data cable connector). If none of these works, your new drive may not be able to work with your existing drive because one (or both) of them doesn't come up to modern standards. Time to take everything back to the vendor for help. If the BIOS does find the new drive and it's larger than 8.4 GB, but the BIOS can't see more than that, you need a BIOS upgrade. Contact the system manufacturer (NOT the BIOS programmers). If the BIOS finds both drives, correctly identifies which is master and which is slave (it may report them as Drive 0 (zero - the master) and Drive 1 (the slave), and correctly assesses the new drive's capacity, good. Go on to the next step below. If you're installing a SCSI drive and the system locks up, it's probably a SCSI ID conflict. If the drive works, but Windows 9x can't see the SCSI drive, you may need a SCSI driver update. Consult the drive and SCSI adapter manufacturers for updated drivers. Setup 2 - Partitioning and formattingIf everything is working, button the case back up, taking care not to pinch any data cables between the case and the chassis. If your new drive is blank and you did not get a full version of Windows 98 with it, you'll need to get one in order to install it on a blank drive (unless of course, you're just going to use it to store programs and files). If you kept your old drive in the master position, that makes life easier because Windows will still be installed there. You need two DOS-level programs to proceed - fdisk.exe and format.com. They're generally found in C:\windows\command or in the root directory of a Windows installation CD or on the boot disk that comes with the full install of Windows 9x. The exception to this little rule is the full installation version (for brand new systems without an operating system) of Windows 98 Second Edition. Microsoft admits there was an oversight: fdisk.exe is on the uncompressed portion of the boot disk, but format.com is compressed and hidden in an EBD (CAB) folder where you can't get at it unless you're already running Windows. Yes, Virginia, this is known as Catch-22 (or you can't get there from here) and it isn't documented anywhere else that I or anyone at Microsoft is aware of other than right here. The solution to the problem is to use the extract utility on the disk with the following command at the A;\ prompt: extract a:\ebd.cab format.com /l a:\ then hit Enter. This will uncompress the FORMAT.COM program and place it in the uncompressed portion of the boot disk, where it should have been. You start with fdisk to partition your drive - and now you have to make some decisions. Even if you plan to use the drive as one large volume, you still have to set the primary partition. Start fdisk, but be careful. It defaults to offering you the master first and you do not want to repartition that (all your data will disappear). Make sure you're dealing with the new drive. If your new drive is 8.4 GB or less, you can use it as one large volume, without using it inefficiently, so long as you use the 32-bit file allocation table (FAT) scheme in Windows 98. If you do not use FAT32 (in other words if you're using the older 16-bit FAT), you'll want to limit your partitions to no more than 2 GB each. If the drive is larger than 8.4 GB, even if you're using FAT32, you'll want to limit each partition to 8.4 GB. It's too complicated to go into here, but if you exceed these limits, you'll waste a significant amount of the hard drive space you just paid to get. You may also want to partition the drive to use other operating systems (such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 when it arrives, or Linux, or whatever), but these are advanced techniques and you'd want to be familiar with the needs of the other operating systems before deciding on which FAT scheme to use, how to set the partitions, how to set up a multi-boot scheme, and so on. One more note of interest. When you add your new drive, funny things are going to happen to your existing drive letters. DOS/Windows has a very specific convention it uses to assign drive letters. The primary partition on the first physical drive (the master) is always C:\. The primary partition of any other physical hard drive comes next. Then it goes back to the master for logical drives, then back to the slave for the rest. Let's assume your existing physical drive already had two partitions (or "logical" drives). The primary partition would be C:\ and the second partition would be D:\. Now you add a new drive with two more partitions. The slave's primary partition becomes D:\; the second partition on the master becomes now E:\ and the second partition on the new (slave) drive is now F:\. If you think you're confused, wait until you restart Windows. It won't be able to find any programs that used to be on D:\ ('cause they're now on E:\). And your internal Zip drive, external backup drive and CD-ROM? They all come after hard drives and have moved down the alphabet accordingly. Among other annoyances, it means that all programs that rely on finding parts of themselves on your CD-ROM drive will probably have to be reinstalled. Experienced computer tinkerers always set their CD-ROM to be far down the list (assigned to drive R:\, for example) so that the letter doesn't change when new hard drives are added or re-partitioned. We're not done yet. After the new drive has been partitioned, but before you can use it, you'll have to format each partition using format.com. You will not want to do what is known as a "low-level" format using any service provided by your system BIOS. Modern drives are low-level formatted at the factory and if you mess with it, you may make the drive unusable. ATA v/s SCSIWhether you opt for an ATA-type drive or one that uses SCSI is an issue that will likely come up if you're searching for a new hard drive. It's also a consideration when thinking about CD-RW (rewritable) drives. Here's a breakdown of the alphabet soup associated with these generic types, as well as discussion of the pros and cons of each. ATA (AT attachment) devices have a variety of confusing names for the same thing. Variously, you'll see them advertised as ATA drives, IDE drives, EIDE drives, UltraDMA, Ultra-ATA and, occasionally, ATAPI drives. "IDE" (integrated drive electronics) was the term first applied to these devices to separate them from a much older drive standard (ST-506 in case you're taking notes). The only problem is that the engineers who design these things always referred to them as ATA devices and never used the term, "IDE." However, it caught on with the public and retailers continue to use it. The original "IDE" specification applied only to hard drives with a capacity limited to 528 MB. To the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) T13 committee that sets these standards, that original set of specifications is now called ATA-1. ATA-2 raised the capacity of these hard drives to 8.4 GB, upped their transfer rates, and provided two controller connectors (total four devices). To the general public they became known as Enhanced IDE (or EIDE) devices. At roughly the same time, the T13 committee began working on a separate set of standards (ATAPI or AT attachment packet interface) to allow CD-ROM and tape drives to be added to the same ATA (EIDE) controllers. These specifications were combined in ATA-3. We're now at ATA-4. Hard drives, CD-ROM drives, CD-R and CD-RW drives, tape drives, and removable cartridge drives of all types can be added to an ATA controller. Hard drive capacities have reached 32 or more GB and the external data transfer speed (the rate at which data gets from the drive, through the controller, to the processor) has risen to 66 MB/sec. Ultra What? Use of direct access to system memory buffering has allowed ATA-type drives to transfer data at higher speeds. Ultra DMA (direct memory access) requires not only compliance by the hard drive, but also explicit support through the motherboard logic chipset. Ultra DMA/33 (33 MB/sec) support first appeared in ATA-3 and Intel's 430TX chipset for Pentium MMX systems. While some non-Intel chipsets now support the faster UltraDMA/66 (66 MB/sec), the only chipset from Intel that does so as of early September August is the recently released 440ZX-100. Something to be kept in mind at all times is that these 33 and 66 MB/sec transfer rates are limits, not absolutes. Whether you actually get that speed depends on the make and model of drive and the design of your motherboard's drive controllers. ATA-Pros & Cons When you're dealing with internal devices that attach to the pair of drive controllers common to all of today's PCs, there's no appreciable performance issues for CD-ROM drives, Zip (and similar removable cartridge) drives or tape drives when compared to SCSI alternatives. Their performance falls far under the upper speed limits of the standard's specifications. As a class, ATA devices are much less expensive than SCSI alternatives (see below), and are therefore much more popular. However, SCSI versions of hard drives and CD writers are faster and external SCSI devices have faster transfer rates than ATA alternatives (see below). Although it's theoretically possible to have more than four internal ATA devices, it's not commonly done and success rates may vary when attempting to try. The usual format is two hard drives on one controller connector and two other, slower, devices on the other. Although some of the T13 committee members still caution that attempting to install a hard drive and CD-ROM on the same cable is chancy, many people, including me, have done it successfully. There is no external ATA connector. External versions of ATA-type devices tend to use your parallel (printer) port or Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector, both of which use much slower data transfer rates than do internal devices. The T13 committee is in the process of working out how FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices will become part of their standards. Last, but by no means least, when installing a second (or subsequent) ATA hard drive in your system, you generally have to set jumpers on both drives to tell them there is more than one drive present; then you have to indicate which is first (the master) in the chain. Failure to set both drives correctly means that neither will work until you get it right. While all of the drive companies now have these specs online, my survey of the drive manufacturers' Web sites suggests that Western Digital has the clearest and most easily found installation instructions for all of its current and past models. SCSI: (Small Computer Systems Interface) is a power user's choice. The advantages of SCSI is that with the latest controllers, you can have up to seven internal and seven external devices attached to one controller and it can be any combination of hard drives, CD drives, removable cartridge drives, scanners and whathaveyou. There are no jumpers to set; each device can usually be set to one of seven SCSI ID numbers (14 if it complies with the SCSI "Wide" standard) and the only trick is not to have two of them with the same ID. You can easily have more than one SCSI controller in the same computer in addition to the ATA controllers that come as standard equipment in today's PC systems, which makes them popular in larger businesses where redundant storage is used for security. Hard drive capacities are up to 43 GB each with 85 MB/sec transfer rates at the high end. The down side is cost. You can easily pay over $300 for a SCSI controller. Devices tend to be anywhere from 50 to 100 per cent more expensive than ATA alternatives. There are also several SCSI standards and cables that can make you crazy before you're done. Nevertheless, SCSI will probably be around so long as people are willing to pay for it. Got a question? Periodically, throughout this series, I'll be writing an extra Computer Wares column answering reader questions. And I'll also try to answer all the mail I receive whether it makes it into the paper or not. You can send questions related to the series to troubleshooter@computerwriter.com. Please do not send formatted documents as binary file attachments (straight text in the message body only). My system is set to reject all unsolicited attachments as a security measure to protect against viruses and it will simply bounce your mail back.
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