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.

The hard drive can be damaged in many ways; it can be physically damaged, the software can be damaged or it can be affected by a virus. You should protect your hard drives and deal with them with care. There is a possibility of damaging the hard drive by exposing it to extreme temperature changes, for example when you are taking the hard drive out of your computer and putting it in another you may turn on the computer when the drive is still cold. This process could damage it or even erase all data on it.

Viruses can erase your hard drive so you should use some Anti-Virus protection. Have it installed on your personal computer in order to take some risks away. There are Trojan horses, which are a specific type of virus that appear in forms of downloadable games, applications or even screensavers, and when you install any of these, it erases the complete drive and destroys all the data on it.

There are some programs that can help you recover your lost data. There is a variety of software that can help you and there are many applications that are good, but these things do not always solve the problem itself.

There are people who fix damaged hard drives and recover the missing data. But those services are can be expensive. If you have some important data related to your business, precious photo’s or other important files on your computer however, it can definitely be worth it to make use of such a service.

There are some things that you can do to try to get your hard drive’s data back. People actually freeze their hard drives by putting them in refrigerators, this actually can help to recover the data but the possibility is low and you could destroy your hard drive permanently.

The hard drive is hardware that is certainly the most important component in one’s personal computer tower. People suffer most if their hard drives are erased which is logical. Imagine gathering information for months or even years and in one moment you lose all of it. You should pay attention and use the right protection to prevent this catastrophe from happening.

The worst case scenario with hard drives is when you work on your computer and store all your business data on it. Hard drives can stop working without any damage done to them. So the best and wisest thing for you to do if you work on a computer is to store all your data on another drive as a backup as well, or even transfer backups to some multimedia, like cd’s, dvd’s, usb’s, etc.

There is a big number of cases where people lost all of their data so try to pay attention on how you preserve it.