Add a new SATA disk drive to your PC.

Unless your profession is being a system administrator, it isn't very often that one would add new hard drives to one's PC. Even for a computer professional ike myself, I may upgrade to a new drive once a year at the most. And quite often I can't remember how to add or upgrade to a new hard drive. That was exactly what happened to me recently when I tried to add a new hard drive. This Christmas I received a new WD 1TB (WD10EACS-32ZJB0) drive. And I was pretty excited about getting this drive, that is almost 7 times larger than the one that I currently have (150GB). As I got down to installing the new drive, I came to the conclusion that I need to document the steps involved, so that in future when it is time again to upgrade or add a new drive, I have something to refer back to. I hope you too may find this useful.

I have a DELL Dimension 9100 that originally came with a 150GB drive. And I have since added another 150GB drive. Never did I think that I would need a bigger drive but these days with multimedia files, it is so easy to fill up your drives. And being a person who do not delete things easily, my drives ran out of space sooner than I would like it to. Thankfully I received this 1TB drive which will solve my disk space problem, for now until I filled it too with more multimedia files.

The first step was getting another SATA cable for the new drive. After getting that I find out that I do not have enough SATA power cable. My motherboard only provides two. Until I transfered all the data from my second drive, I need three power cable. The next thing to do would be to pop into Frys to find a SATA power adapter cable, which will convert the other power cable into the SATA type. Found one for $2.50 and problem solved.

Powered down the computer, and connect both the SATA and the power cable to the new drive. Powered on the PC again and went into the Disk Management program. (Click Start, right click My Computer and select Manage. Finally click Disk Management.) I was expecting to see the new drive listed among the installed drives. But for some reason, it wasn't showing itself. The next thing to try was to switch the SATA cable from the second drive and connect to this new drive. And voila, I could see the new drive now but the second drive is now missing. At this point in time, I decided to proceed with preparing the new drive first and worry about the second drive later.

Even though I could see the new 1TB drive but it was shown as uninitialized. The command for creating new partitions was disabled. Since I could not remember how I did it the last time more than a year ago, I had to click around in the Disk Management program. Finally found the way to uninitialize the drive by right clicking the Drive Number (drive1 in this case) and select the initialize command. After doing that, nothing happened, and the drive still showed as uninitialized. Decided to exit the Disk Management program and re-enter the program. This time the drive finally showed as initialized. Now we are getting somewhere. From here on, it is basically to proceed to create new partitions and then format the partitions. Finally, to name the partitions with the available drive letters. So the new drive preparation is completed.

Now to resolve the issue of the third drive not showing in the Disk Management program. Tried another SATA data cable and still the same result. Did some research on DELL support forum and it dawned on me that I have missed an important step - enabling the third SATA drive in the BIOS setup. And sure enough, in the BIOS setup, the third and the fourth SATA drives were shown as OFF. Turn the third drive ON and rebooted. Now all the available drives can be seen in the Disk Management. And I could now proceed to transfer data between the drives.

A summary of the steps involved in adding a new SATA drive to the computer.

• First get a new SATA data cable for the new drive. And check to see if there is another SATA power cable available on the Motherboard. If not, just pop into Frys or some other store to get the appropriate SATA power adapter cable.
• Connect the SATA data and power cables to the new drive.
• On bootup, go into the BIOS setup. (For a DELL machine it is pressing F2 on boot)
• Enable the next available SATA drive in the list. Sav the change abd reboot
• Go into the Disk Management program, by clicking the Start button, right click My Computer and select Manage, and finally select Disk Management from the left list.
• The new drive should show up in the list of available drives. Right click the new drive number (eg drive1 for the second drive or drive2 for the third drive, etc) and select the initialize command.
• Restart the Disk Management program.
• Proceed to repartition by right clicking the drive space and select New partition. Create as many partition as you need. If you need a partition that can be installed with an operating system, then create a primary partition. Otherwise create an Extended partition. Once the Extended partition has been created, you may proceed to create Logical drives by right clicking the selected partition.
• Name the logical drives with the available drive letters
• Format the logical drives or the Primary partition. For a Windows OS, choose the NTFS format.
• Once the formatting is completed, the new drive is ready for use.

That's it, the exercise on how to add a new SATA drive.