A+ Hardware Service Technician: Upgrades, Troubleshooting and Preventative Maintenance

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Upgrading the Hard Drive

With the ever expanding amount of software and data being generated, adding an additional hard drive or replacing the hard drive is a common upgrade in computer systems.

Adding a Hard Drive

Adding an additional hard drive takes a little more advanced knowledge than upgrading the memory, though the task isn’t too difficult.

Many retail hard drive upgrade kits contain easy to use instructions and procedures to help the common person upgrade their computer. With your understanding of computer systems, adding an additional hard drive will be easy.

To add an additional hard drive, you will need to power down your machine, remove the power cord, and open the case. Remember to use a wrist strap to ground yourself prior to working inside the computer.

Locate an empty hard drive bay in the case and mount the hard drive into the case. If you current hard drive has an EIDE cable, check to see if it has an additional open port for the new HD. If the cable is a single port variety, you will need to install an EIDE cable which has two ports.

Check the setting on the first hard drive and see if it is set to Master or Cable Select. If it is not yet set, set it now. Set the new hard drive as the Slave and plug the IDE cable into it. In addition, find an available power cord and plug it into the hard drive. Typically, the power cable has a white connector with five small holes in it.

Close the case and plug the computer back in. When the computer starts booting, it may detect the new hard drive or you may need to set it up in the BIOS.

Next, load your operating system and perform a high level format on the drive (or partition it if needed).

Upgrading the Existing Hard Drive

Upgrading an existing hard drive is similar to the process for adding a hard drive except that you will need to replace the hard drive in the steps above. If it is the primary hard drive on the system, you will either need to backup your previous hard drive and restore the data into the new HD, or reinstall your operating system on the replacement HD.

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