OK, I just bought a used hard drive off of ebay. I had to replace my old hard drive. What disks do I need to use to make this hard drive work on my pc? Do I need to format it, boot disk and what not, need some easy steps to fix the new hard drive so that it'll work on my pc. Do I need to buy anything is there any free downloads? HOlla.
NEED SOME PC HELP!!!
- Thread starter Mean Mugg
- Start date
you need to make sure the little jumper on the back is set to master(assuming its the only hard drive in there) then you need to have a boot disk which is usually on a floppy. hook the hard drive up to one of the IDE cables in the computer.(long gray skinny cable with red line going down one end) Then secure the hard drive in with the 4 screws you should have. now boot your computer up with the boot disk in the floopy drive. If the monitor turns on and you can see your hard drive in the list of primary and secondary drives your in good shape so far. now the next thing it will do is try to boot to windows not finding windows it should boot to to floppy. One in floppy you are going to need to delete the primary partition on that hard drive and then create a new one. Depending on the hard drive size this could take a while. once this is done exit the program and it should take you to a dos prompt. where you see something like C:/ and there you will need to type FORMAT C: it will warn you its going to erase everything which is fine unless this used drive has shit on it you want to keep. Once this is done you will need to put a operating system on it but you should be good to go from here.
OK, it's the only hard drive in there (60GB), for windows ME. I don't have a boot disk, I downloaded winme.exe but put it on a floppy but my cpu doesn't work if you have a floppy in when it starts for some reason so that's out. Hopefully I can download a free boot disk and be able to burn it onto a cd-rom. Yup, I hooked up the ide cable and the P4 cable. It's not secure because the hard drive that's in there has a stripped screw so i can't take it out. So I just placed it on top of it where there was room. And yes I want to completely erase the hard drive I got from ebay. I got ya on everything else so I just need a boot disk.
you said you comp doesn't work if you got a floppy in the drive. try pressing ESC as the computer starts. it should take you to a screen with a bunch of options. one of those options should say something like HDD > FDD > CDROM > LAN. change that option so FDD is at the beginning, then save your changes and try restarting with the floppy disk in the drive. if that doesn't work, then just redo the process to change it back.
you SHOULD be able to start your computer with a floppy disk...hope this helps
you SHOULD be able to start your computer with a floppy disk...hope this helps
