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Upgrade Guide

Installing a new hard drive, step by step.

  

So you think your hard disk is large enough? Well, beyond the demands of Windows, Office, and all your shareware, you face the real space gluttons. For creating or editing graphics, sound, or video files, you need more than last year's 2GB or 4GB EIDE hard drive.

Before you install a new hard drive, though, take note: Pre-1994 PCs don't recognize drives larger than 528MB, pre-1996 PCs have a 2.1GB barrier, and some more recent PCs max out at 8.4GB. Although software bundled with EIDE drives evades these limitations, consider updating your PC's BIOS anyway, especially if you're concerned about Y2K compatibility. If your PC has a flash BIOS, you can upgrade by downloading software from the manufacturer's Web site. If not, you'll need to buy a BIOS upgrade chip.

New EIDE drives use the 33-mbps Ultra DMA/33 interface. The EIDE connectors on PC motherboards made more than two or three years ago, however, can't handle that speed. You can use contemporary drives, but not without sustaining a slight performance hit.

Since your new drive will be bigger and faster than your old one, install it as your C: drive and use the old one as your D: drive. To copy your data from the old drive to the new one, use the disk copying utility that accompanies the new drive, or buy one separately (simply copying the files using DOS commands won't work).

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