Installing drive jumpers | Installing Driver | how to install drive

IDE connectors are often keyed, as to prevent inserting them backwards. It does not take much force to bypass this and possibly ruin your motherboard. Look carefully at the drive and the cable connection before you try to connect them. You should see a "missing" pin on the drive, and a corresponding blocked socket on the connector. If you break a pin on the drive, you will probably have a worthless drive.

Most parallel IDE cables have a colored stripe down one side. That colored stripe signifies "pin 1" - and usually will line up next to the Molex power connection on your drive. Use this rule of thumb if your connectors are not keyed.

How a drive is physically installed will depend on the case.

A Serial ATA connector

Floppy Disk Drive Cable

Most new drives are SATA (Serial ATA) which use simple, small cables for a data connection. The ends of the cables are L shaped, just look carefully at the cable ends and the connector on the drive and match them up. Only one drive can be connected to each SATA port on the motherboard. Some SATA drives have two different power ports - make sure you connect ONLY ONE of these ports to the power supply, connecting both can damage the drive.

Older drives have PATA (Parallel ATA) connections which use a flat ribbon (IDE) cable for data connection. When using an IDE cable, plug the two connectors that are closer together into the 2 drives, and the third to the controller or motherboard. The connector furthest from the board should be attached to the drive set as Master. Make sure the drive that you will install your OS on is the primary master. This is the master drive on the Primary IDE bus which is usually the IDE 40 pin port on the motherboard labelled “Primary” or “IDE 1”..

Incoming Search Tearms

Installing drive jumpers

Installing Driver

how to install drive