Law Office Computing

February, 2003

Winton Woods

Installing A New Standard  or Removable Hard Drive

Update: Last month I suggested you purchase Roxio’s GoBack 3 and Symantec’s Ghost software. I have recently discovered a package deal that contains GoBack, Ghost, Symantec Anti-virus and several basic Norton disk utilities all on a single CD. And, what a deal it is!  It is called Norton SystemWorks 2002 and it can be purchased over the Internet for $14.95 from www.dealdealdeal.com . The same company offers Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Standard with Dragon Voice Dictation software for $44.95. In my case the product was delivered over the weekend.I recommend dealdealdeal.com very highly. What follows are details on making your hard drive removable as I suggested last month.

 Hard drive prices seem to be in a free fall. Western Digital is selling their 80 GB EIDE hard drive for $120 with other drives up to 200 GB for about the same per gigabyte price or less. The 80 GB is probably enough for most back up users.  The  purpose of this column is to tell you what is involved in installing a new hard drive and how to make it removable. Everything I say here relates to the installation of a standard IDE drive. SCSI drives present different issues. Finally, this column may seem a little geeky but the process is not as difficult as it may seem.

Two limitations on hard drive size are important. First, there are operating system limitations. Until the advent of Windows 95 the effective limitation on hard drive partition size was 2 GB or less. With the advent of Windows 95, larger hard drive partitions were enabled. It was then that the second limitation came into play. That limitation is contained in the basic startup files programmed into your computer call the BIOS. Up until about 5 years or so ago BIOS limitations prevented installing hard drives in excess of 8.4 GB. The most recently shipping computer systems have removed that limitation and that is what is permitting the explosion in hard drive size and the collapse of prices. Before you buy a new hard drive, however, you need to check the capacity of your BIOS by calling the manufacturer of your computer or checking on their Internet site. Even if your BIOS does not directly support large hard drives, however, Western Digital has a work around using its Data Lifeguard installation software. Go to http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp for information and free download of version 10.0 of the software.

Installing a second hard drive is not hard. It is, however, a little risky and you must make sure that you have fully backed up all of your critical information before you start the project. After you have completed your backup, it is safe to open your computer case. First, look at the back of your hard drive. You will see two connector slots. One of them has 40 pins and is designed to connect to the hard drive IDE controller which is wide flat belt. The other has four large pins and is to be connected to the power supply. You will also noticed a smaller pin set has a small plastic cap, called a jumper, designed to connect two of the pins together. Either on the hard drive itself or in the documentation that came with it you will see a picture of this pin set with alternative places to put the little plastic cap. It is the placement of the plastic cap that configures your hard drive to be either a slave or a boot drive. Follow the pictures carefully and make sure you have the plastic cap in the right place. Check and double-check this placement because if you get it wrong the drive will not be configured correctly and will not work.  I am assuming that you are adding a drive to an existing system and you probably want that drive to be a slave with the existing drive primary. However, if you have a CD drive installed it is probably in the slave position on the first drive controller  which is the thin flat ribbon that connects up the drives. No matter, however, since most modern motherboards have space for a second drive controller. It is probably in the form of an extra ribbon cable that is loose inside the case. Your drive kit also probably has an extra ribbon cable for use for the Second Drive controller.  Look at the documentation that came with the drive. If you bought your drive from Western Digital it will have clear pictures of the procedure that make it very easy!

When you have configured the drive, you are ready to install it into your machine. Since every machine is different, I leave it to you to read your documentation about hard drive placement in the computer case. The next thing you must do is to locate an available power supply plug and an IDE controller plug. Look at the existing hard drive for an example of the two plugs you are trying to find. When you find them, plug them into the new hard drive in exactly the same way the other plugs are plugged into the existing drive. There is a red or white line on one side of the flat ribbon cable that has the 40-pin plug on it. That red line must be next to the power supply plug. Again, check the hook up on your existing hard drive. Most hard drives come with very good instructions, complete with photographs that make this process almost impossible to mess up. If you follow the photographs carefully, you will have completed the physical installation of the drive in 15 minutes or so. Now comes the dangerous part.

Most of the new hard drives come with a floppy disk that contains the basic program for installing the hard drive. Sometimes you will have to go on to the Internet in order to download the installation software. I have found the Western Digital software to be virtually idiot proof and that may argue even more strongly in support of buying a Western Digital hard drive. What ever you do, follow the software instructions with the greatest of care. These instructions are not hard to follow and do not require geek level computer skills. The software itself is usually very straightforward but be prepared to call customer support in case you have a question. This is not a place to take a guess about what some ambiguity means. Remember the people who write these instructions are not lawyers and it is possible that there will be an occasional ambiguity. <grin> Customer service can fix that and I urge you to have their number at the ready. If you guess, and guess wrong, you may format your existing drive and lose all your data. That will not be total disaster, however, because you have fully backed up your drive before you started.<grin, grin> But I say don’t cheat Mother Nature. Go slowly and carefully here. You will finally arrive at a screen for the software that will actually format the new drive. At this point, you will be able to make a choice between dividing the hard drive up into multiple partitions or leaving it as a single partition. Since this is to be a backup drive you should probably choose a single partition. The Windows Backup software built into your operating system will work beautifully with your new hard drive. Since that hard drive is separate from your existing hard drive there is a high-level of safety involved in putting your backup files there.

To make the drive removable you can buy slideout tray that makes the hard drive completely removable if you have extra bay space in your computer case. You install the drive in the tray and install the tray in the open computer bay just as I described above. That removability provides high-level security for both information and backup files. Installation of the removable drive tray is about as easy as changing spark plugs in a Volkswagen Bug and so is something you might want to consider. The trays can be purchased at any computer supply house such as FRYS or CompUSA and come with instructions and pictures.

There you have it! First class software and removable backup hard ware for under $200, and it is fun!