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Storage Swap
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Hardware Glitches
December 2003 • Vol.7 Issue 4
Page(s) 56-59 in print issue
Storage Swap
Replacing A Defective Hard Drive
Once your hard drive dies, your computing also pretty much comes to a halt. That's because there's very little you can do with a PC without this important storage device.
Fortunately, a hard drive replacement gives you an opportunity to buy a bigger, faster one. This article will tell you how to remove your old hard drive and install a new one. "What To Do When . . . You Think Your Hard Drive Crashed" (page 17) and "Keep Your Drive Alive" (page 52 )are other articles in this issue that offer information on how to prevent and recover from common hard drive glitches.
We'll assume you're replacing your drive because of a failure of some kind, so we'll describe a clean installation of your OS (operating system; such as Windows) and applications (such as Word). See the article "Cover Your Bases" for more information on reinstalling your OS and apps from a backup/drive image.
Identifying & Buying Your Drive. Before you buy a new 3.5-inch hard drive (3.5-inch refers to the diameters of the hard disks inside it), make sure you know which kind to buy. There are a few interfaces (electrical data transfer standards with specific cables) desktop PCs use to talk with hard drives. It's cheapest to replace your drive with one of the same type, although you can buy and install an adapter card to support a faster or newer interface.
Most PCs use the EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) interface, which is also called ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment), DMA (Direct Memory Access), UltraATA, and UltraDMA. EIDE drives' data cable connectors have 39 or 40 pins. Current EIDE drives use either ATA/100 (100MB per second) or ATA/133 (133MBps) interfaces. All of the EIDE interfaces—which can carry data much faster than their drives can steadily supply it—also are backward-compatible, so a new ATA/100 or ATA/133 drive should work in your EIDE PC, if not at full speed. Use a data cable rated for ATA/66/100/133 to avoid limiting your new drive's top speed.
To install a new Serial ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) drive like this Western Digital Caviar in your computer, you'll probably need to add a SATA adapter card for about $50.
Some PCs use the new SATA (Serial ATA) interface for hard drives. SATA drives are similar to EIDE units, but they use skinnier cables with black L-shaped connectors. Among other benefits, SATA has a higher potential top speed than EIDE, 150MBps. However, you probably won't be able to tell any speed difference between SATA and EIDE versions of a particular drive in a typical PC.
Servers and a few desktop computers use SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) for their hard drives. SCSI drives are fast but expensive and may use various 80-pin, 68-pin, 50-pin, or 25-pin data cables. See the photo in the "Identifying Your Hard Drive" sidebar in the previous article to help you tell an EIDE, SATA, and SCSI drive apart.
In general, newer hard drive models are faster than older ones. Also, drives that spin their hard disks at 7,200rpm are typically speedier than 5,400rpm drives, which will make your computer "feel" faster. At this writing, a 120GB Special Edition Caviar WD1200JB 7,200rpm EIDE drive from Western Digital costs $96, including installation software. A SATA retail kit with a 120GB Maxtor 7,200rpm drive comes with cables, installation software, mounting brackets, and instructions for $139.
Physical Installation. The best source for instructions and installation software is your new hard drive's manufacturer. If you didn't get these with your drive, it's worth the effort to locate a working PC with an Internet connection and download them from the manufacturer's Web site. The "Hard Drive Manufacturers" chart in this article lists the Web sites of the major drive vendors.
Installation procedures vary among drive brands, so follow the manufacturer's directions where they differ from ours. Also, be sure to touch a bare metal part of your computer's case often as you work inside the PC to avoid damaging any sensitive components with static. Make sure you handle your hard drive very, very gently, and keep it in its antistatic bag until installation time.
The following instructions are for installing a 300GB Maxtor hard drive and ATA/133 adapter card in a PC with Windows XP Home. Many drives come with PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) adapter cards that add the ATA/133 or SATA interfaces and/or support for drives larger than 137GB, so this drive's installation procedure will give you a good idea of what to expect.
Shut off your computer and remove its lid or side panel. Find an unused white PCI slot—it should match the pin edge of your adapter card—and remove its corresponding rear metal plate. Rock the PCI card gently but firmly into the slot, and screw the top of its rear plate in place. Note that this procedure is the same for SATA cards.
Next, connect your computer case's LED (light-emitting diode) wire labeled "HDD" to the LED connector on the adapter card. Later, if the LED doesn't light during use of the PC, reconnect this wire upside down.
The wide, flat cable connected to your old hard drive is the data cable; the one with four color-coded wires is the power cable. Grasp the power cable's connector and wiggle it out of the rear of the hard drive. Do the same with the data cable and then remove its other end from the motherboard or adapter card if your new drive came with a fresh cable. Remove the screws holding your old hard drive in place, and gently slide the drive out.
If your new EIDE data cable has three connectors and isn't labeled, attach the end connector farthest from the other two to the new adapter card's primary EIDE header (socket), which has the lowest number (IDE1 on our Maxtor card). If you're not using an adapter card, connect the cable to the primary EIDE socket on the motherboard, even if that means moving a cable to the secondary EIDE header. Make sure to line up the connector's bump with the notch in the socket. If there's no bump, line up the cable's red stripe with the socket's pin 1. SATA cables only attach one way, but take care not to break their plastic connectors.
Follow the diagram on the new drive or in its instructions to set the drive's rear jumper(s) (plastic blocks with internal wires) to the "master" position pins. You many need to use tweezers to remove a jumper, as they're pretty small. EIDE can have two devices on each of two cables, so a jumper setting designates one drive a master and one a slave so that the computer can tell which device is sending which data. The master drive goes on the end of the cable, and the slave drive, if present, goes on the middle connector. The hard drive that contains Windows should be the master on the primary EIDE cable. Note that Maxtor recommends setting its drives' jumper(s) to CS (cable select) when they'll be used with an ATA/133 card, but the master setting worked better for us.
SATA drives don't need jumper adjustments, as SATA only accepts one device per cable. However, certain SATA drives, such as Maxtor's DiamondMax 9, have jumpers you should not move. This drive's PM2 Enabled jumper is for a feature that was left out.
Gingerly mount your new drive in the old drive's bay using the screws that came with it or your old drive. Attach the end of the data cable to the new drive, then a power cable.
If your new drive is a SATA, it may accept a regular 4-pin power cable, as well as a SATA power connector, which will probably require an adapter cable. Use only one type of power cable, not both. SATA's power cable connectors look like data connectors but are wider.
Maxtor's DiamondMax 16 300GB EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) retail kit ($299.95) includes everything you need to install a truly large hard drive in your PC.
Partitioning & Formatting. After physically installing your new hard drive, the next step is to prepare it to store data. The first phase is to partition it into one or more sections, each with its own drive letter, such as C: and D:. This step also assigns the drive a file system, such as FAT32 (32-bit file allocation table) for home use or NTFS (NT File System) for home or business use. The final phase is to format (initialize) the partition(s).
Fortunately, drive installation software makes all this easy. WinXP users, note that WinXP's installation CD is bootable (meaning it will load an operating environment when you start your PC with the disc in the CD/DVD drive). Its Setup program can partition and format your hard drive as part of the OS installation. See the Installing The OS & Software section below for more details. We've also added instructions for using Microsoft's obsolete FDISK utility.
If your installation software, WinXP CD, or FDISK can't tell that your new drive is connected, your PC's BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) may be too old to automatically detect the drive. Check the drive manufacturer's tech support information in the drive's documentation or on the Web site for help. For instance, you might need to type in CHS (cylinder/head/sector) numbers in your BIOS or move a jumper to the 32GB limit setting. Note that you may not be able to use the full capacity of your new drive with some older PC motherboards and OSes, and even WinXP may need Service Pack 1 from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com to fully support drives larger than 137GB. Installation software. Here's how we used Maxtor's MaxBlast 3 software to set up our 300GB hard drive on a WinXP Home machine. Follow the directions at http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm to download MaxBlast 3 and create a bootable diskette if it didn't come with your new Maxtor drive. Turn on your PC long enough to insert the MaxBlast CD in the optical drive. Now press your computer's reset button to reboot it. Our IBM system wouldn't boot to a CD, so we had to press F1 during bootup to enter the BIOS Setup utility. We used the arrow and ENTER keys as indicated on the screen to enter Start Options and Startup Sequence. We changed the First Startup Device setting to Diskette Drive 0, the second device to CD-ROM, and the third to Hard Disk 0. We pressed ESC twice to get back to the main menu and then navigated down to Save Settings. We pressed ENTER twice, then arrowed down to Exit Setup and pressed ENTER twice again. Our PC rebooted to MaxBlast's welcome screen.
Click your preferred language in MaxBlast, then Run MaxBlast 3 Installation Software and click I Agree. There is some interesting stuff in the next menu, but for now, click Set Up Your Hard Disk. If you're using an adapter card, click the Ultra ATA Controller tab. Now select your new drive's icon and click Next. Click the box reading Continue With Selected Option And Erase Existing Data, then click Next. Choose the OS you want to install later—we chose Windows XP—and click Next.
Because some PCs and OSes have trouble with hard drives this big, we avoided the Easy Installation, which makes one big partition only. Choose Advanced Installation and click Next. Click Add and the Create Partition window will appear. If you want the entire hard drive to be one big C: drive, simply choose FAT32 or NTFS under Select Partition Type and click OK. FAT32 is compatible with Win95OSR2/98/Me/2000/XP, but NTFS can store more data on large partitions and has security options. The current version of NTFS is compatible with Win2000/XP and partly compatible with WinNT4 with Service Pack 4.
We like to create three partitions on hard drives: one for the OS, one for applications, and one in which to save the documents and files we create. We've also encountered problems with partitions larger than 137GB on some systems. Because of this, we used the slider in the Create Partition to make a 50GB partition, chose NTFS in Select Partition Type, and then clicked OK. We clicked Add again to make two partitions of about 125GB the same way.
Once your drive's pie chart is fully blue with the partitions you want to make, click Next, Erase (if present), and Next again. MaxBlast will create the partitions and format them.
If you installed a Maxtor adapter card, click Exit, then Create Maxtor Ultra ATA Driver Diskette. Click the I Agree box and click Next. Insert a spare diskette into the floppy drive and click Next. You'll need to make this disk before you can install WinXP below. Click Done and eject the diskette, then click Exit.
Remove the MaxBlast CD and insert your Windows CD, then reboot your PC. If the screen tells you to press a button in order to boot to CD, do so. Skip ahead to the Installing The OS & Software section below for our WinXP installation steps.
FDISK. As a last resort, you might try using the FDISK partitioning utility if you cannot download installation software from your drive's manufacturer. FDISK is available on Win95/98/Me boot disks; see the article "PC ER" for information on how to make one. We recommend the Win98 or WinMe version of FDISK for its FAT32 support.
Unfortunately, FDISK may not correctly report drive capacities of 64GB and higher, meaning you'll be flying a little blind if you have a larger drive. It also may not recognize storage space above 128GB on a drive. After using FDISK, you'll need to format your drive's partition(s) with the DOS FORMAT command, explained below.
After you physically install your new drive, restart your PC with your boot diskette in the floppy drive (see the BIOS Setup steps in the MaxBlast instructions above if your PC won't boot using a diskette). When the prompt appears, type fdisk and press ENTER. Enabling large drive support means using FAT32 rather than FAT (2GB maximum partition size). Select Yes if you plan to install Win98/Me/2000/XP or No if you'll use Win95 or another early OS.
In FDISK's Options menu, select option 4. This displays the existing partitions on your new drive, which should read "No partitions defined." If you left your old hard drive attached for some reason and FDISK shows it instead of your new drive, press ESC to go back to the Options menu. Select option 5, then the number of your new drive.
We made three partitions on a 120GB Western Digital hard drive with FDISK. We created the first as a primary partition (one that supports a bootable OS) of 7GB. Next, we made the remaining space into an extended partition. Extended partitions are nonbootable in some OSes but can be subdivided into logical drives that act just like partitions and have their own drive letters. We decided to divide the extended partition into two logical drives of about 40GB and 73GB. You can make up to four primary partitions, which may make life easier if you want to install more than one OS, such as WinXP and Linux, later.
In the Options menu, choose option 1. This creates a primary partition in which you'll install Windows later. Don't let FDISK use the drive's whole capacity for the primary partition. Type in the number of MB you want the primary partition to be, such as 7000 for 7GB (1GB equals approximately 1,000MB; don't put a comma in 7000). Press ENTER. After FDISK checks the disk, choose option 2 in the Options menu and then select your new primary partition. This will make it active (bootable). Press ESC when you're done.
Next, create an extended partition using the rest of the drive's available space. Select option 1 and then suboption 2. FDISK misreported our drive's remaining space, so we entered a percentage of the drive's total space instead of a number of MB. We typed 94%, then pressed ENTER and ESC. FDISK assumed we wanted at least one logical drive in that extended partition. A 40GB logical drive would have been about 35% of the extended partition's 113GB, so we typed 40%. FDISK asked us if we wanted another logical drive using the remaining space. We agreed and returned to the Options menu.
To review your new partitions and logical drives, choose option 4. As expected, FDISK's reported sizes for our extended partition were off. However, when we pressed ENTER to view the two logical drives in that partition, they both displayed their proper sizes. Exit FDISK, then shut down your PC.
Next, you'll use DOS (Microsoft's old text-based OS) to format your new partitions. Reboot your PC with the boot disk. At the prompt, type format c: and press ENTER. You can name the partition if you like. Format your logical drives you made the same way, with format d: and then format e:. We named our C: drive WINDOWS, the D: drive APPS, and E: DATA.
Finally, eject your boot diskette, insert your OS installation CD, and then restart your system.
We used Maxtor's MaxBlast 3 installation software to replace our hard drive. A utility suite like this really takes much of the work out of preparing a drive.
Installing The OS & Software. Installing your OS and apps from their original CDs takes longer than reinstalling them from a backup medium, such as CD-R or tape. However, it avoids duplicating all the corrupt data your old, failing hard drive may have had, not to mention all the junk files Windows accumulates over time anyway.
After you reboot your PC with the WinXP CD (pressing a key to boot from the CD when prompted), you'll have just a few seconds to press F6 when the bottom of the screen asks if you want to install a third-party SCSI or RAID (redundant array of independent disks) driver. If you miss your opportunity, restart your computer and try again. Press the S key, then insert the Maxtor driver diskette you made and press ENTER. Use the Up or Down arrow key to choose WinXP Promise ULTRA133 TX2 Controller, then press ENTER and S to use the driver Maxtor provided. After Windows accepts the driver, press ENTER again to continue.
At the Welcome To Setup screen, press ENTER, then F8. If you haven't already partitioned and formatted your new hard drive using the instructions in the previous section, choose WinXP's option C to do so now. Read the previous section on MaxBlast and FDISK for background information on partitions and file systems first. If you've already made your partitions, select the C: drive with the arrow keys and press ENTER. Press ENTER again to leave the file system on the C: partition intact.
Better EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) hard drives have a diagram showing the correct positions for their rear panel jumpers. This makes proper installation easier.
After Setup loads a bunch of files, it will display a red bar counting down 15 seconds until it will reboot. Be sure to eject the driver diskette before the restart. Follow the simple on-screen instructions through the rest of the WinXP installation.
The pain after the procedure is installing all the updates and patches for your OS and apps, not to mention getting their settings back the way you like them. After you install Windows, make Windows Update your very first stop. In WinXP, click Start, All Programs, and Windows Update. Download and install critical updates before anything else.
When you do install your applications, remember to install them on the D: partition. For example, if a program wants to install in the C:\PROGRAM FILES\NEATAPP3 folder, click Browse, Options, or whatever button is presented. Highlight C with the mouse pointer and type D, resulting in D:\PROGRAM FILES\NEATAPP3. Use the same trick whenever you save a document, digital photo, or other personal file, but change their destinations to the E: drive. This will keep your OS, apps, and data neatly separated and easier to back up.
by Marty Sems
Hard Drive Manufacturers
If you bought a bare OEM (original equipment manufacturer) hard drive rather than a retail boxed kit, you may not have received any installation software or documentation with it. Fortunately, if you have access to a working PC with Internet access, you can download these aids from the drive manufacturer's Web site.
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