Trying to install new hard drive in old pc..

[Messer]

A friend of mine has an oldish PC its a Pentium of some flavour and has a 10gb hard drive installed currently, which as you can image is pretty full to the max..

Anyway, he has bought a 250gb maxtor IDE hard drive but is having problems getting the PC to recognise it, someone has told him that he needs to update the bios? What do you think? If it does need the bios updating, where do you get it from and whats the process of updating it - is it straightfoward?

 

[MarkE19]

With the old IDE HDD's there are a few things you need to set correctly when adding a new drive. Have a look at This Guide to installing an IDE HDD as with a quick look it appears to cover everything you should need to know.

It is possible that the MoBo BIOS will need updating to be able to use the new HDD. You will need to find the make & model of the MoBo and then go to the support pages of the makers site and find any BIOS updates along with the update instructions.

Mark.

 

[ntm1275]

As previously mentioned, it probably needs a BIOS update from the manufacturer of the motherboard

If the PC is a Pentium 4, you should have no problems in getting a BIOS update

If it is a Pentium 3, you may find that some motherboard manufactures will have an update, while others won't (this was about the time that 250GB drives appeared on the market)
I seem to remember reading somewhere a few years ago when I wanted to upgrade my P3 machine, that this age of PC may have a limit of about 137GB
See here

If it's a P2 or older, the chances of getting a BIOS update for a 250GB drive may be difficult to get hold of, as any updates were stopped being made before 250GB drives appeared on the market

 

[k4p84]

Before you go flashing away have you tried the obvious:

How are you connecting the new HDD. ie, adding it in to be a slave drive keeping the original HDD as the system drive. If you are running them both to the same IDE header on the board you will need to set the jumpers on the HDD themselves to cable select. Have the System drive on the end of the cable and the slave on the middle connecter.
The jumper settings will be printed on the label of the drive itself.

If you are running each drive seperately to its own IDE header on the motherboard you will again need to set the jumpers.
This time set the system drive to master and the slave drive too....slave .

Pop into BIOS and make sure you can see both the drives.

If windows is not detecting the new drive go into:

start menu - right click on 'my computer' and select manage - go the the storage option.

here you will see all the storage items plugged in. sometimes windows just needs to be told what to do with this new volume. this is often the case with home built external HDD.

right click on the new volume and assign it a Drive letter and quick format it.

Windows should now recognice it.

if you need any more help give me a shout.

ED

 

[MarkE19]

If you are running them both to the same IDE header on the board you will need to set the jumpers on the HDD themselves to cable select.

I would strongly suggest you do NOT set the jumper to 'Cable Select' as in my experiance this cause more trouble than it is worth. Instead I would set the boot drive to 'Master' and if you have a second drive on the same IDE cable set that to 'Slave'.

If you are running each drive seperately to its own IDE header on the motherboard you will again need to set the jumpers.
This time set the system drive to master and the slave drive too....slave .

If on separate IDE cables then both drives should be set to master on the jumpers. Only set the jumper to 'Slave' if you already have another device connected as Master to that IDE cable.

Mark.