This page is for those that want to know more about installing EIDE hard drives on their systems.  For those of you that have done an install please let me know what I may have left out of these pages.

How do you install a new hard drive?

1) Read   2) Plan  3) Back up old data	Part 1
4) Install   5) Set up  6) Format	Part 2
Read my "Formating OSR2 with Fat 32" Page

The first thing you want to do is read as much as you can about installing a hard drive in your system.  Read over all the instructions included with your new drive, read the instructions in your Packard Bell manual, read the web pages of the manufacturer of your new hard drive and read any other info about installations that you can find.

While you are reading think about what you need to know and how you are going to go about the installation.  Try to print everything you might need  since once you start you work you will not be able to use your computer for a while.

At this point you should have a basic idea of what is going to happen.  Use the info you have learned to plan a course of action.  Make sure you have alternative plans.

Also make sure you have answers to these questions;

• What drive will be slave?
• What drive will be master?
• What are the jumper setting for both?
• Are you reinstalling Windows when you are done?
• Do you have all the materials you need to do the job?
• IDE cable, screw drivers, screws, proper software, flash light, drive rails, lunch, tech support numbers or what ever.
• Do you understand the dangers of  Electo Static Discharge (ESD)?
• Are you installing a new operating system (OS) or using the one you just installed?
• What option are you going to do?

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Options -
You have a number of options when you instal your new hard drive, these are:
1. 1)  Install you new drive as a slave, this is the easiest option and requires the least amount of work.  Simply install, FDisk and format and then it is ready to use.
2. 2)  Install your new drive as master - This one has a little more involved because you may need to reinstall you OS, you will also have to move all you files from you old drive to your new drive.  I prefer this option over the last one because this let you use you new a C: which has it's advantages.
• Your new drive is probably faster, larger and less noisy then you old drive.  Technology moves fast and the new drive is most likely much better then your old drive.
• Also your old drive may have years of use, so why not use the new drive for the mission critical operation.
• By reinstalling you OS and all apps you can increase performance.  Think of all those programs you downloaded, installed and deleted after the trial ran out or you simply did not want it any more. your current system has the scars of all these programs.  Unless you have real good software to remove these you will have all kinds of orphan files and registry lines.  By installing everything fresh you can can have a clean system with only the files and applications you want.
3. 3)  The third option is installing the new drive as master with a new OS or updated version of you OS -  I chose this option, you get all the benefits of #2, plus the added benefits of the OS you chose to use.
• I had Win 95 with all the patches to make it equal to Win 95a, but I used this opportunity to upgrade to Win 95b that has the added benefit of Fat 32 and large hard drive support.  Osr2 is the first version of windows to support Fat 32 and larger hard drives, the earlier versions only support Fat 16 and 2.1 Gig hard drives.

This is the most important step, you can loose everything if you are not careful.  I bought a Iomega zip drive to back up my data.  it is not the best choice since I had to back up 100 MB segments at a time, the ideal are devices that allow you to save the entire drive.

I also found this to be helpful since as I lost some dll files to run certain programs I could just go back and get them.  Also if you are keeping the same OS then you might be able to simply copy most of the info to your new hard drive.