Well, the time has come for expansion. William's second birthday was coming up so I decided it might be nice to take a little bit of video rather than just taking photos. And with video comes the need for more disk space. Recognizing the need in advance, I rushed out to buy the biggest hard disk I could find for my computer/server so I had somewhere to put the video to download. The picture below shows me with my purchase prior to installation. Proper American style "big"!
So, joking aside, I've seen lots of adverts stating how easy it is to install an internal hard drive. If you can use a screwdriver you're done! Well, that wasn't my experience and I've changed many hard drives before. Admittedly my prior hard disk installations were about 15 years ago in an MS-DOS v5.0 environment so things were probably a little simpler then.
Part of the problem may have been that I ordered my gigantic hard disk on-line and it arrived by itself in the anti-static wrapping, but no box or instructions or anything of any help really. Not a problem, I can figure this out. First, take the computer to bits - easy enough, the Dell I have has a removable side panel that opens with the turn of a knob. OK, so you need to know which drive is going to be the master and which is going to be the slave. Again, easy, the one in there already has the operating system on it so that will be the master and the new one will be the slave. OK so the existing drive is in the wrong bay. Yep, no worries, just take that one out and swap them over, screw them in and ...... oh! As I said, the new drive came on its own in the anti-static wrapping. When I say there was nothing else with it, I really mean nothing else - not even the screws needed to hold the drive in with. Luckily I have an old floppy (the years have not been kind to me) from which I raided the necessary screws. Couple of turns and it's all back together and ready to go.
Now, before I even turned the power on I realized I'd forgotten to set the jumpers on the drives to designate which is the master and which is the primary. I'd plugged them into the right place, just hadn't told them what their role was. Not sure how this popped into my mind - it was a flash back from having previously installed drives as there's nowhere that it tells you that this is a required step (given that it didn't come with any instructions). Being optimistic I turned it on to see if it would work but, as expected, it didn't. So, take it all to bits including removing both drives, set the jumpers correctly (after searching the manufacturers website for the settings) and put it all back together again.
Switch the computer on again and hey presto .... Nothing! OK - restart go into the bios, make a few changes, restart and the bios at least picked up the drive. Now, back in the good old days, once you configured the bios to recognize the drive you had the option for format it from the bios. Well, not anymore, you can still use the DOS fdisk or Windows disk management. Might as well use Windows, that's bound to be easy. In fairness, it is very easy to use. I did, however, notice that it was saying that the disk was only 128Gb when in fact it was 500Gb. I thought I'd format it anyway and then see if it figured it out during the process. Forever the optimist and again wrong. It only recognized the drive as being 128Gb. I restarted, looked in the bios again and that had it as a 500Gb drive. The hardware driver also had it as a 500Gb drive so what was wrong?
After more searching of the world wide web and coming across an article on systems only recognizing drives up to 137Gb unless large drives are enabled in the Windows registry. So, it seems that your system needs to be able to cope with large drives and then you need to tell Windows that you've stuck one in. If you have this problem and end up on this site, you need to enable large block addressing by:
- Open regedit (Start > run > regedit)
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters
- Right click the word "parameters" in the left window and select "new" then "DWORD value"
- Name it "EnableBigLba"
- Double click it and enter a value of "1"
In fairness, it's not that difficult and would be very easy if there were a step by step guide. I'm pretty sure the newer operating systems don't require you to make the Windows registry edit, but I'm using Windows 2000 so that may have contributed to making this more difficult than it needed to be. That said, a little more involved than just being able to use a screwdriver.
