Installing a Hard Drive 8-6

   To physically install a hard drive, you put it in the drive bay and put 2 to 4 (depending upon how many you lost when you took the drive from one computer to another, but you definitely should go with at least 2). Plug in the IDE Cable and power cable or the Serial Cables if it's a SATA drive.

     Theoretically you checked the bios before you installed the drive, the system boots up and presto-digitato you have a second hard drive installed. But lets say you didn't check the bios before you installed the cable and only one drive shows up in windows explorer. Well, it could be a bad hard drive, the bios set incorrectly not have a second hard drive on that IDE channel, the jumpers set incorrectly on the two drives, if they are sharing an IDE channel.

   Here's a look at an IBM hard drive jumpers:

Have fun figuring this one out. hehehehehehe

   Western Digital hard drives are a lot easier to configure, master, master with a slave, slave, cable select, and a set they use at the factory. Maxtor are relatively easy as well, J50 on - master, J50 off - slave.

Since you can only have one device per SATA connection internally, I suppose there's not a problem with figuring what's wrong with a drive that doesn't show up. The port on the board is bad, the cable is bad, the drive is bad or SATA is not enabled in the bios.