Installing a second hard drive the easy way

So you have read carefully the previous chapter and you are prepared for installing a second hard drive. If by any chance your first hard drive has installed Windows XP on it you are almost done, because you see now you have available an easy to follow GUI (Graphical User Interface) on your side.

So if you were successful in adding physically your secondary hard drive and you made your computer to recognize it via the BIOS software, you must now simply boot normally, enter Windows XP and go to Disk Management from the Control Panel. There you have it. Easy to follow and intuitive this makes installing a second hard drive into a fun experience. Now of course this depends a lot on what you consider to be fun.

Another way to quickly install and partition your new hard drive is to use Partition Magic. I find this program to be very useful especially if you are using Windows 98 and you have a strong aversion on using a CLI (command line interface) such as the one provided by the FDISK utility. When using this program you should remember that partitions can't be larger than 32 gigs if you are using the FAT32 file system and that in some cases although the BIOS has properly detected a large hard drive your operating system may not. Even Windows XP can fail at this point if it is in its original form and does not contain Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2. Anyway Partition Magic is your friend as it allows you to play with partitions with great ease. Further still this piece of software allows you to play with the partition sizes WITHOUT losing any data. This reason alone is enough I think to make this software a must have.

If by any chance you don't have any operating system installed on your primary hard drive that supports a GUI partitioning (Windows 98 is an example), you must take the hard road and do it the old way. First you will need a Windows 98 boot disk. This can be done fairly easy. Than boot in into your BIOS and check that the first boot device is the floppy (A:).

Now it's show time. Put the bootable diskette into your floppy unit and restart the computer. When you finally reach the command prompt type FDISK. From this point on you must create all the partitions from that crappy interface. Always remember that FDISK cannot create NTFS partitions and always remember to press YES when it asks you if you want large disk support. This is just a fancy way of telling the computer that you want FAT32 partitions instead of FAT16. Why not FAT16 you may ask. Wellï¿½ let me put this way. FAT16 allows a maximum partition size of around 2 gigs. Now in the unfortunate you have a 100 gig brand new hard drive you will end up with about 50 very small partitions. Now that would be a challenge.

About The Author:
Nick has been a technical writer of a computer magazine for over 5 years. He has a website where he has collection of his reviews about different computer hardware components. Visit http://www.harddrivematters.com to read about harddrive and other computer components suitable for your computers.

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Title:	Installing a second hard drive the easy way
Author:	Nick Dorich
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Installing a second hard drive the easy way