Fitting your drives

After fitting the cables to your motherboard we will need to fit the drives that they go onto, As a caution measure just rest the drives where you would like them and make sure that the cables reach ok and that there is nothing that impedes access to the back of the drives. It may sound silly but some cases have a few problems as regards to access to the drives.

It is up to you whether you fit the cable to the drive before or after you fit the drive in place, it depends what you think will be easier for you. Personally I tend to fit the drive first as long as I have checked the cables will reach. When plugging the IDE cable into the back of the Drive the same rule with the red line applies. Red line to pin one of the drives IDE port. There maybe a little piece of plastic on the connector that prevents you from plugging it in the wrong way but this is not always the case. As a rule pf thumb you will probably find that the red line goes to the end where the power cable is connected (which should also have a red cable in it Red to Red).

Newer S-ATA drives have a different connection type. Serial ATA cables are much thinner, use less power and the connections can only be placed in one way so you can't place these on the motherboard or the disk incorrectly.

* When screwing in the Drives its normally best to use the screws that come with the drive as then you can be sure of not damaging the Drive's insides. Sometimes longer screws can damages working parts when screwed in too far.    

Now Fit the floppy drive in the same way and plug the floppy cable into the back the same way you have with the IDE cable. Then fit the power cables to all the drives you have just installed. These should only fit in one way so there should not be a problem installing these. 

Now is a good time to reboot your computer to see if everything is working OK again, plug the power leads back into the computer and turn it on. the hard disk should start to spin up if this is so you can switch it off again as it seems that everything is OK.

   Tip

If your hard disk starts to make a whirring noise but nothing is happening, then the noise is likely the fan only and your disk is not booting up. This is a classic sign of an IDE cable being plugged in the wrong way. 

If it all seems fine we will need to do some BIOS work to configure the hard disk and CD drive etc, so unplug your Power lead again and fit the keyboard to the appropriate slot, the chances are you will be using a PS/2 keyboard, some of you may use a USB one in which case you will have a hard time setting up as USB is only recognised by the OS. You will need to at least borrow a PS/2 keyboard however you may find that USB to PS/2 converters are shipping as standard with most notable manufacturers. You may be using the older AT style keyboard on AT socket 7 machines, in this case the only round connector it will fit in will be the one. When using PS/2 its a tiny bit more complicated because there will probably be 2 ports one for the mouse and one for the keyboard. It should be labelled as to which is which.

To the right is a picture of two PS/2 ports (left) and two USB ports (right). In my experience the top and the green PS/2 port is for the mouse and the purple bottom port is for the keyboard, just check with the motherboard manual for which is the correct port. Plugging the keyboard in the incorrect port will throw up un-necessary errors when booting up. The USB ports connect devices to your computer that are interchangeable even when booted up. You can get USB keyboards but they are no good for setting up a machine unless you have the PS/2 adapter with them. Once booted up press the appropriate key to get into the BIOS when prompted usually either Delete, Escape or F1.  

  Next - Configuring the CMOS

 
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