Advice on installing hard drive (and a few other minor things)

[Mike7]

About 90 days ago, I got a Western Digital hard drive. That 120 gig one, with the 8 meg buffer.

I'm finally about to install it, now that I've purchased a new computer. (A Dell Dimension 4500.)

Thing is, I lean sort of to the incompetent side when it comes to hardware issues more complex than screwing in a light bulb, so --

1) The drive came without any additional stuff. No manual, no extra hardware, no nothing. Just the drive. Am I correct in thinking that I've got to go and buy some sort of mounting kit, in order to install it in the new computer? If so, any advice/recommendations/warnings regarding this purchase?

2) I've found a couple of websites that explain how to install a new hard drive. It seems straight forward enough. Is there anything any of you would like to emphasize, before I chop a hole in my new computer with an ax, then Krazy Glu the hard drive in place?

3) I'm leaning toward removing the budget 20 gig drive that comes with the Dell, and simply replacing it with the 120 gig drive. As opposed to installing the big drive, using it as my primary drive, and demoting the 20 gig one to secondary status. It just seems simpler to swap one for the other, than to keep both, and it's not like I'm going to need the extra 20 gigs when I already have 120 gigs available. Am I right in thinking that swapping big for small is my simplest option here?

As for the minor things --

4) Are NIC cards essentially "plug and play?" Can I just remove the one from my old computer, put it in the new Dell, and expect it to work?

5) I'm thinking of removing the DVD drive from my old computer and installing that in the new Dell. Any advice?

6) The Dell comes with XP Home. I have a copy of XP Pro. As long as I have the "better" version of the OS, I'd like to use it. Any warnings regarding upgrading from Home to Pro?

Thanks for your time and help.

 

[GAZZA]

OK here goes

Installing a hard drive really is and should be a pretty simple experience if you understand the basics .


You could add the 120 gig drive and use it as a slave device , this would probably be the easiest of all to do as you'd have your operating system intack (even if it is XP Home) but you'll need to configure the drive as a slave device if your going to connect it to the same ide cable that the 20g drive is on.

If your going to do a direct replacement for your current 20 gig drive then you should have no real trouble , just unscrew the old drive and install the new one . The new drive should already be configured as a master slave as this is the default setting from the factory , but you can also double check by look on top of the drive and look at the jumper diagram .

Now with 120gig's you have quite a bit of room for storage , infact if you leave it as one partition you may run into problems later on such as a corrupted operating system which if you weren't able to fix , could end up losing all your valuable data.

One way of eliviating this is to partition your drive as in cutting up that 120g drive into say 2 or even 3 partitions but that is all a matter of preferences as everyone has their own idea of what they like when it comes to partitioning a drive .

Personally I would probably cut it up into 3 parts , first partition approximately around 10gig's ,second partition and third partitions splitting the rest in half.

Here is a good explanation on Partitioning and using Fdisk

Most NIC cards if they are PCI should be Plug n Play and be auto detected when booting into windows .

Installing the DVD should pose no problems again if you understand the basics of how any type of IDE device is connected and jumpered , again there should be a diagram on the top of the drive giving your indication of how the jumper is supposed to be set if using either master or slave .
Now if your new pc uses ata66/100 cables then these also have a parity of types that needs to be understood , you'll notice that the cables have 3 connectors with each being a different colour .

Blue connector attaches to the motherboard

Grey connector attaches to the slave device (this is where your second device is connected to provided the drive has the jumper set to slave)
Black connector attaches to the master device (normally you use this if your using a single drive with the jumper set to master)

Installing Home or Pro shouldn't pose any problems for normal home use , pro just has a few more features addes to it such as dual cpu support and being able to connect to a domain.

Hope this helps