new hard drive

How hard is it for a person who I would say has computer skills,but not too much knowledge as far as those types of things go to install a new hard drive?i'm thinking of picking up a new hard drive,and installing it myself,but i'm not too sure of the difficulty level of doing it.

 

when you say "install new hard drive" do you want to use it as an extra drive or a primary drive with an operating system. If the latter is true, do you want to retain your current installation and transfer it over to your new drive.

The act of putting a new drive in the system is very easy. It requires a screw driver and 2 hands. The difficulty of the act of configuring the drive for the purpose you need is dependent on what your goal is.

 

Retail boxed hard drives come with very specific, step-by-step instructions and software that should allow you to easily install one without much trouble. About the only thing I think some of them may overlook is the orientation of the ribbon connector in the drive's socket-- the striped edge goes nearest the power connector on the drive.

 

I'm going to be using it as my primary drive and I want to copy everything that is on my current hard drive to the new one.Thanx for all the info!

 

Im 15 and i just installed a HDD.
With the help of Google and Major Geeks.

 

TheDoug is right, if you get a retail boxed HDD they come with very good and detailed instructions. You will enjoy it and if you run into any problems you have the best help around (MG).

Be sure and get a static wristband or something before you go fooling around in there. Good Luck.

Steve

 

you may want to look into drive image software if you want to transfer your system to the new drive.

 

You can avoid the latter part of the installation (transferring the OS to the new HD) if you are running WinXP Prof. Prof. version enables you to do couple things with multiple hard drives, spanning, mount points..... kinda simplifies things. If you are running Win9x/Me then I would definitely take kodo's advice. Look into drive imaging software like Norton's Ghost. What that allows you to do is take a snapshot of your current system and save it to a single file called an image file.
Cool thing about this is create a boot CD, add the image file and ghost program and in essence create one nifty backup. Takes me less 5 mins to restore my old Win98 system to the state I saved it as. When I used to use Compaq's restore CD's it took me over and hour and then countless hours getting rid of all the crap Compaq insisted I needed...........bleh

 

The HD kit should come with a disc that includes a drive cloning program, but Ghost is a good idea. It will clone your drive and will create back-ups also. I have mine backed up to DVD, and also to my old drive. It took me an hour or so to do mine, with cloning my drive and a little dusting thrown in, too.