Pangloss
feu follet
Registered: Aug 2000
Location: 54.60°N 5.70°W
Posts: 1950 |
GUIDE TO INSTALLING A NEW HARD DRIVE (Windows9x)
Alright. Assuming that your new drive is the most common type, IDE (connects straight to the motherboard's IDE socket) you should have your drive, some fittings and an IDE cable. You will need to have a look at the back of the drive. Typically, there are some pins which are numbered. Depending on your existing configuration you may need to adjust these.
Take note of what the BIOS readout says during boot up. You will have one hard drive and a CD/DVD-ROM. The hard drive should read as being Primary Master, with the CD-ROM being either Secondary Master or Primary Slave. If the former you will need to set the new drive for Primary Slave, and if the latter set it for Secondary Slave. Clear? There's more than one way to do all this, but this is my way and it works. Refer to your Drive's manual for the correct pin settings for master/slave operation.
You will also need a clear 3.5" bay in your computer into which you will put the drive, normally located below the floppy drive. If you have an older case and no free space then you will need to put it in a 5" bay under the CD-ROM. For this you will need bracket adaptors which can be bought from most computer shops.
Assuming you have a free bay, stick the drive in with the connections facing towards the mother board and screw into place. You will need to provide it with power, so look at the power cables coming from the Power Supply Unit (PSU) in the computer. There will be some free connections which fit into the drives power socket. Find one which reaches and connect. Next, take the IDE cable and attach from IDE2 to the new drive. Mind the red line running along one side of the cable. The drives manual should indicate which way to insert the cable (it's not foolproofed - it fits both ways). The cable fits into the motherboard in the same orientation as the existing IDE cable.
Assuming that we have done all this, booted the computer and the BIOS has recognised that there is now another drive installed, you will need to fix and format it before you can use it.
Boot your computer and hold F8. Choose the MSDOS option (or just boot as normal and choose Start > Shut Down > Restart in MS-DOS Mode). Once at the c:\ prompt type fdisk.
Warning: Be careful during this stage - one slip up and you could fuck your computer royally
You will see a list of options, from which you will need to choose the first: Create a dos partition or a logical drive. Follow the on screen instructions and it's pretty straight forward from there. You will be asked how much of the drive you want to use for the primary dos partition. If you don't know what this means, just leave it at it's default setting; it will use all of the drive. If, however, you know a little about partitioning drives, you may set this for any amount. There are pros and cons for partitioning - some love it, some hate it. I love it. Win98 (and OSR2.5 Win 95) uses FAT32, which means that it is better at splitting data into small bits. It's a little known fact that a 1K file on your computer doesn't take up 1K of space - it must take the FAT minimum, which is usually something like 4K or 8K. I've put the table at the bottom of this post.
So. You have followed the instructions and successfully fixed your disk. Assuming that you kept it as one or two drive(s), type fdisk again and choose option 4 - Display partition information. Have a look at what it says. There should be your original C drive, along with extended D drive (and E if you partitioned your new drive twice).
Back at the c:\ prompt, type format d: to format your new drive. If it's large it will take some time. When it's done, give it a lable (call it something) and that's pretty much it. Don't let computer store motherfuckers tell you that you need to bring your computer in and have them do it for $100. You can do it yourself.
As for the Linux issue - that's a little different.
quote:
Originally posted by MstrG:
Also, if I were to put this drive on a machine in which the main drive was a single partition containing linux (and constantly running), would I still be able to access the second drive over my peer-to-peer network from a Win98 PC (assuming the second drive contains FAT32 partitions)?
The short answer is that I don't see why not. Your existing setup should work, but if it doesn't I'd recommend installing an FTP client such as ExceeD onto your computer and allowing access to your new FAT32 drive. You should alse be able to see your new drive, and access its data from within Linux (no real)
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TECHIE STUFF.
Here's why you should partition drives people. No one has small hard drives any more. For example, if you have an 16-32GB drive the smallest possible file size on it must be 8KB. However, 8-16GB has a min. file size of 4KB. This significantly improves your computer's ability to store data efficiently. If you have a drive over 8GB, you would be well advised to think about partitioning before installing.
If you're installing a new drive from scratch in a new PC there is also another advantage. You can keep c: for windows and program files and d: for data and work. Then, when windows fucks up, you can quite happily just reformat it and reinstall without worrying about your work etc. It's a pain in the ass having to reinatall all your s/ware and d/load all the stuff you like again, but so what? Small price to pay, eh?
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The dreams ain't broken here; they're just walking with a limp...
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08-16-2000 02:35 AM
