This page is for those that want to know more about installing EIDE hard drives on their systems.

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

• 1)  To begin the installation make sure the power is off on your system and then set the proper jumpers on each drive.
• 2)  If the new drive is a 3.5-inch and it is going into  5.25 bay you will need to instal the mounting brackets and and rails according to your manufactures direction.  I found the Maxtor rails did not fit in my Packard Bell computer.  Luckily Packard Bell included these rails when I purchased the system.  You will need these, look for two or four brown mounting rails with all that other stuff you saved when you bought the computer.

PB Drive Rails You have to use these to install a 3.5 size device in a 5.25 bay on most Packard Bell Computers.  Most of you should have got these with your system, I remember seeing them and had no idea as to what they were.		Maxtor Drive Rails These are useless on a Packard bell computer.  You should have seen me trying to get the hard drive in the computer with these.  Save these, they probably work in standard cases, and if you ever get a new case you might
The part number for either the left or right PB rail is: 146701, Packard Bell sells them for $5 each.  PB sells them through their customer service # (801) 579-0160.  You will need these.

• 3)  Next hook up both drives with the dual drive IDE cable.  I found that my cable would not fit, to solve this problem you have a number of options.
• Get another cable, I had trouble in my area finding a cable that would fit.
• Put the cable in in a different way.  maxtor told me that the IDE cable can be installed any way you want.  They said most of the time it will work with no problems.
• Get a second set of mounting brackets and install the two drives right on top of each other.  this is the method I choose, it did use up my last 5.25 bay, but oh well.
• Install your slave drive on the IDE cable with the CD-ROM.
• 4)  Attach a power cable to each drive.  There is no order to which cables need to be used first.

• 1)  Power up the system and enter the drive parameters for the new drive into your computer's CMOS setting.  On the PB 640 you can set the BIOS to auto detect and the system will do everything for you (to do this you might need to reboot after you set it to auto detect).  You can also use the USER DEFINED setting and enter in the settings given with your new drive.
• Notes:
•  Most BIOS from AMI Bios from 7-25-94 on will support large drives.  This lack of support will show when the bios reports less cylinders then are on your drive (1024 Cylinders = 504 MB).  or the system may also hang during the boot procedure.  If these happen you have three options:
1. 1)  Upgrade the BIOS - Check the Packard Bell Web Site they have many updates posted. You can also buy new bios, for companies like Mr. BIOS.
2. 2)  Upgrade the interface that supports Logical Block Addressing (LBA is the technical term for the BIOS being able to detect the large hard drives)
3. 3)  Use the special software supplied by the hard drive manufacture, this is the cheapest option.  With Maxtor they supply this software, it is called Max Blast.
• 2)  Next reboot, with a bootable diskette in drive A: (remember, if your drive C: is the new drive then it won't be bootable).  This boot disk should be for the OS you are installing.
• 3) IDE drives are usually only low level formatted, for systems that are going to have Windows 95 on it you will need to partition it with DOS FDISK and then high level format with DOS FORMAT.
• Notes:
•  If you are using Win 95 or Win 95a you are limited to partitions of 2.1 Gig in size.  For larger drives simply format them into multiple partitions of no larger then 2.1.  All drives must be Fat 16.  You will need to have smaller partitions to take advantage of smaller cluster sizes.
• Systems using Win 95b (OSr2) can have partitions up to 2 Terabytes (TB).  You will also have you choice between Fat 16 and Fat 32. (Note: Both drives do not have to be the same Fat).  To use Fat 32 the partition must be larger then 512 MB.
 

Cluster size difference between Fat16 and Fat32

Fat 16		Fat 32
Megabytes (MB)	Cluster Size	Megabytes (MB)	Cluster Size
128	2	512 to 8	4
256	4	16 GB	8
512	8	32 GB	16
1024	16	>32 GB	32
2048	32

 
To understand the importance of the Fat, think of it this way.  Each cluster is a file and an icon is 1 KB.  So for a 4 KB cluster size an icon will take up 4 KB of hard drive space.  Now if you have a larger cluster size that same 1 KB icon file will take up 32 KB for a 32 KB cluster size.  this shows you how much space you waste by using the larger cluster sizes.

Before you format you drive you need to partition it for the operating system that you are going to be using.   however you need to be aware of  the limitations your operating system will place on you.
 
• Operating System Partition Limitations:
• FAT 16 operating systems a 2.048 GB (4093 - 4095 cylinders), 4.2 GB (8190 cylinders) and 8.4 GB (16380 cylinders) partition limitation for defining partitions on a hard drive. Here are some of the operating systems known to have these limitations:
• DOS
• Windows 95 (FAT-16)
• Windows NT using FAT-16
• OS/2 using FAT-16
• Other Operating System Partition Limitations:
• Window NT using NTFS has a partition limitation of 4 GB per partition
• The DOS Partition Limitation: The DOS partition limitation is derived from the File Allocation Table (FAT). DOS uses the FAT to keep track of hard disk space. The FAT is only capable of working with 32,768 bytes per cluster and no more than 65,536 clusters. If you multiply the  two numbers together, you get the maximum partition size that DOS can use (2,147,483,648 bytes or 2048 Mbytes (2,147,483,648 {10242}).

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Run F-Disk -
The above information should help you decide what partition you want to make, for me I choose one 3.5 Gig partition with 4 KB fat 32 clusters.

The manufacture of your hard drive should have step by step instructions for Fdisk, if not check out Maxtor's site.

Maxtor FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions  

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Format -
Boot the PC with your operating System Setup Diskette and follow the steps to format.   Once completed if the drive is the master you can install you operating system.  If the drive is slave simply start using it.

Read my page on Formating OSR2 with Fat 32.

An interesting note, until I got my Internet connection working I keeped both drives as Master.  This means I could not have both drives plugged in at the same time.  I would simply swap which drive was plugged in to the computer, reboot and change the BIOS setting.  When I wanted to work on the other drive I would simply do the same thing over again.  This was a pain but it took me three evenings to get my system back to 100% (Now I just have to reinstall all the games).  I should have done it on a day that I did not have to work.

Good luck in your upgrades - I hope these pages shed a little light on the subject.