Another hard drive question..?

Question

Ok .. I have the box open - I want to replace the hard drive (which has failed) with an old one from another machine (which I know works) but - (and this sounds sooo dumb - but here goes..) I think I have found the hard drive (is it the thing with the cable marked HDD plugged into it? - yellow red and 2 black wires??) Near the front of the machine?? - And my next question is - I know there is 2 hard drives in this machine - How do I know which is the primary to replace it?

Many many many thanks to you guys ..

Samantha

Answer 1

Ok let me try to explain this in the best detail that I can. The first thing to remember is that even if 2 hard drives show up on your computer, there may actually be only one physical drive due to partitioning, which will make your computer act as if they are two separate drives. Now as far as what you are looking for. Inside the case you will see the Motherboard. (The big board with everything plugged into it) On that motherboard, you see some (I'm guessing these are IDE drives here) flat gray cables with a red stripe on one side of them. You will have one or two bigger ones and most likely a smaller one running to your floppy drive. Follow these cables and you will see where they plug into on the other end of the motherboard. It should be pretty obvious to tell which one is the CD-ROM drive because you can see where thats at from outside the case. The other one (or ones) should be the hard drives. I can't tell you how to positively tell you which one is the bad one (if there are two) because I don't know how the computer is set up, but if this is a name brand computer (Dell, Gateway, HP, Compaq, etc) then I'm guessing it's only one drive partitioned anyway. If there are 2 drives, the easiest way is to just unplug one and hook your new drive up. You'll find out when you go to boot if you are right and it won't hurt anything.

Also when you are hooking the new drive up, pay close attention to that red stripe on the gray cable. It should be closest to the power supply (where power connects into the drive)

Answer 2

First all hard drives look similar like these :

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=hard%20drive&btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

The cable you should be interested in is either the red one approx 1cm wide (for sata drives) or the grey ribbon cable (for ide drives) The other cables are for power (yellow black/red) and have either a black or grey end respectively.

If there are two hdd in the machine go to your control panel>administrative tools->computer managment->disk management and by right clicking on the drives you can find their makes and sizes (which hopefully are different) you should then be able to read on the tops of the drives which is the one to replace.

Let me know if you need more.

Answer 3

the one with the jumper set to master

Answer 4

u can check this site for more information

http://www.helpwithpcs.com/upgrading/install-hard-drive.htm