Diverse Drives

You’ve just bought a new drive (DVD, CD) and want it fitted on your PC quickly. If you don’t know how to, it may take several days till your vendor helps you out. You can fit it yourself; it’s not difficult, provided you have the courage to open up your PC and go through the techy manual that came bundled with your new drive.

Every drive usually comes with an IDE cable. This goes into the drive in only one direction, unless you shove it forcefully and break a few pins in the process. The other end of this cable goes into an IDE port of the PC. Every PC normally has two IDE ports, called primary and secondary. Follow your existing hard drive or CD drive’s cables to locate them. You can connect up to two drives on each IDE port. One has to be configured as master and the other as slave. Every drive has jumper settings on it to configure it in either master or slave mode. Check your drive, locate the jumpers, and change them according to the way the IDE ports on your PC are occupied. If only the primary IDE port is used, then you can connect the new drive to the secondary port as a master. If both ports are occupied with a drive each, then the new drive can go into any port as slave. Hook it up, find a spare power socket from your computer’s power supply, and fasten it into one of the free bays on your PC. Close the lid, fire up your OS, and install the drivers that came with the drive.