First, we need to ensure that the hard drive is set up to be the master drive on
its IDE cable. Each IDE cable can support up to two IDE devices, such as
hard-drives, CD-drives, Zip Drives, etc., but in order for this to work, one IDE
device must be designated as a master device, and one must be designated as a
slave device. You cannot have two master devices or two slave devices on a
single cable.
Examine the top of your hard-drive. There should be a chart there depicting the
necessary jumper settings to make the drive a master or slave device. Otherwise,
the chart will be somewhere on the body of the drive. The set of jumpers will be
on the back end of the drive.
Ensure that they are set correctly to enable the drive as a master. You may need
a set of tweezers to move the jumpers around if you have been biting your
fingernails.
Insert the hard drive into the 3.5" drive-tray and screw it in securely on both
sides. Note that hard-drives generally use a different sized screw than CD-ROMs
and floppy drives for some completely inexplicable reason.
Hard Drives and Cables Attach the Molex power cable to the drive. Unlike the
floppy drive power plug, these Molex connectors can only fit into the drive one
way, so relax, you can't make a mistake here.
Attach the Primary IDE cable to the drive (for any recent motherboard, this
should be a 80 wire UDMA cable). It will be keyed to only fit in one way, but to
make sure, the red or blue on the cable should be facing the hard-drive power
cable.
Attach the long end of the cable to the IDE 0 connector on the motherboard
first, then if there are other drives attach those IDE cables to the IDE 1
connector. Serial ATA drives are still fairly new, so we will only cover them
briefly.
The Serial ATA cable is keyed to fit into the SATA motherboard header, and hard
drive in a certain orientation. It is impossible to attach the Serial ATA cables
backwards, and since there is only one hard drive per cable we don't need to
worry about the master/slave settings of IDE hard drives.
Serial ATA and IDE are not compatible, so to use SATA hard drives the
motherboard must have SATA headers. Some motherboards may come with SATA-to-IDE
adaptors, but again the motherboard still must have one SATA header per drive.
The SATA hard drive will require either a 15-pin SATA power connector, or
standard 4-pin Molex power connector as we described previously.
