harddrive hook up

[chuckman45]

can someone help me please!
i have a small 486 computer and there is no harddrive that came with it. i found a 540mg
drive which was what was in it at first.
it has a floppy drive hooked to the main board. the cdrom is hood to the board. and that is all the spots that there are on the board. none for the harddrive to hook in.what will i hook my harddrive to the floopy or the cdrom.and what about the switches.

[Banti]

Does the CDROM cable have three connectors on it?

One in the motherboard(MOBO)
One in the CDROM
and one that is lose? If so this lose one is what you will use. You will also need another power connector. Look at the cdrom drive. There will be a 4 pin connector called a MOLEX connector. The center two wires will be black, and the outside wires will be red and yellow.

If you do not have one or the other you will need to purchase cables.

For the MOBO connection get a IDE cable, for the power get a y-splitter.

If you have all of the cabling, connect the drive, and see what happens.

There are small pins on the back of the CDROM and hard drive. They are normally between the IDE connection and the power connection. Set the hard drive to master and the CDROM to slave. More than likely you will need to add this drive to your bios settings. You will also need to set up the drive (possible fdisk and reformat).

If you can set the bios to AUTO-DETECT for the PRIMARY MASTER and PRIMARY SLAVE under STANDARD CMOS SETTINGS.

If these suggestions do not help, please respond with motherboard and or computer info (maker/model no./etc)

Good Luck,
Banti

[SDT]

I suspect that the ide port that you have your cd-rom hooked to should also control your hard drive.
The hard drive should be the "master" and the cd should be the slave (set by the jumpers on the drive). The ide cable should have 3 plugs on it. 1 at each end and 1 in the middle (roughly). I seem to recall that the cd should be on one end and the hd in the middle. Take note that the master / slave relationship does not always work between brands (ie a maxtor hd (master) MIGHT not work properly with a mitsumi cd as a slave. If both components came with the origional system they should work ok.

[commodsquad]

Ok, you would use the flat cable (should have an extra spot in the middle of the cable to hook up another peripheral) that is hooked to the cd rom ..set the hard drive as master (MA) by placing the little jumpers in the correct configuration (you can usually find the specifics at the hard drive's manufacturer's website if you cant find it post the model # and who made it, someone will help you find it)..You then will set the cd rom's jumpers to slave (SL)..You then will have to boot up and go into the BIOS set up and set the drives to autodetect if it has that option..although it might see them and do it itself but i dont know since you didnt tell us what brand of 486 it is..you will most likely get some beeps indicating that the configuration has changed and it will prompt you to press a key to go into set up so you can change things to what they should be or be able to set the auto detect..reboot after that and make sure you have a windows floppy boot disk that will allow you to continue..
you can set the partition(s) on the harddrive by typing fdisk at the prompt (if you dont know how to do this im positive that someone here can explain it better than I)and reboot again with the floppy and then type in format c:\ s (is that right? gettin forgetfull in my oldage LOL) at the prompt...I know that I pretty much generalized the process so maybe someone with a little more details can help here....hope that helps...

[This message has been edited by commodsquad (edited 02-07-2000).]