There is one thing called jumper on the hard drive, you need to change its location from Master to Slave if you have the Master, if not live it as master. This is not needed when installing SATA drives.

It is not important if its IDE or SATA drive, the process of installing it is completely the same. You will get some cables that are used to connect the drive to your motherboard, just try to secure a safe place in your tower for the new drive. Also try to avoid touching other cables, circuits and panels in your computer tower. First connect data cable and after that you can connect the power.

Watch when installing because hard drives are really sensitive piece of hardware.

After that you should turn on computer and enter BIOS immediately to check if it recognizes the drive, sometimes it recognizes it automatically, sometimes you need to change some options in order to make BIOS know the component is there.

Now you should know that drives are low formatted when you get them, so you should do “high level format” before using it. You could just boot for example XP and go to “my computer” to find a new drive located in that folder. Then select the new drive, right click on it, go to tools and select Format. It will ask you to choose the file system and you should choose NTFS system, click start after that and be patient. This operation can last long, especially with large capacity drives, but leave computer working until this operation is finished.

Once it is completed you can reboot your personal computer and then find the new drive. Adding a new drive may change letters for other drives, so don’t be confused with it.  This is what needs to be done, but you can never know what can go wrong with computers.

If your computer’s system still uses FAT32 you may have problems with bigger capacity drives like 120Gb drive or a larger, the system sometimes can’t recognize them. Service Pack 2 could solve this problem, or you can update your BIOS if you have some really old motherboard. You can also turn off your computer, check cables again just to make sure everything is connected as it should be. After that reboot, go to BIOS to see if the device is recognized now, you may even need the boot disk for your system or you can download it too, it is needed to format this new drive before it can be installed as a slave drive of your original Master drive.

If this does not help try calling some computer repair service or computer repair on site service that can look at the problem and fix it in no time. You can try to fix problem yourself but it is always advised to contact some help and support and see what is the best thing to do when a problem occurs.

Shut down your computer, restart it and try to play some media disc, or try to read its data. If you can’t eject the disc after this, reboot the system again, enter BIOS and check if your bios can register the drive. Sometimes you have to enter CMOS and enable the disabled drive. If bios can’t register it, it may be an ATA drive failure. You could call a computer support center and see if they have computer repair on site that could save some time.

Before you open the computer, make sure that your drive isn’t locked by some type of software. The best way to notice that is to reboot your computer and manually hit the eject button located on your drive before the system loads, right after restarting. Some media player software can lock the eject button in hardware, when that happens you can use the software eject button.

Sometimes whole personal computer trembles and makes noise when CD’s and DVD’s spin. Check if the drive is well mounted with screws if it is not, try to tighten them a bit. Try ejecting and reinserting your media disc, because it just can get of balance. Discs can shatter too, if they are not inserted how they should be, they can get of balance, shatter and destroy the drive too. If the problem appears only on one or a few of the discs, then it’s not the drive, if you have problems with every disc, then it is best to call a computer repair Service.

If your computer can’t even recognize your drive you should look for drivers on the disc you usually get with your drive when buying it. You can always call some computer support center and get information you need. You can download the drivers latest versions from the internet, just go to the manufacturers page and look for it.

Sometimes you can’t play your DVD movie on a computer, the problem usually is with CODEC. Usually media player displays error message connected to CODECS. You should look for CODECS on the internet, but beware there are a lot of people who will try to sell you CODECS, and you can get them for free. If you are installing CODECS it is best to find some good codec pack that has a variety of CODECS in one installation file.

If you have some other problem with your drive, it is best to call a computer repair service that can fix your computer or some of the components.