Installing All Types of Drives

This chapter covers the actual installation of hard drives, optical drives (CD/DVD), floppy drives, and tape drives. This includes everything from preparing the components to setting jumpers to installing the actual cabling and physical installation. I also dig into some initial system software configuration issues, right up to the point of installing the operating system. From that point on, the steps you take depend on which operating system you are installing.

For more information on drive interfaces, magnetic storage, drive operation, and operating system issues, see the following chapters:

• Chapter 7, "The ATA/IDE Interface"

• Chapter 8, "Magnetic Storage Principles"

• Chapter 9, "Hard Disk Storage"

• Chapter 10, "Removable Storage"

• Chapter 11, "Optical Storage"

• Chapter 15, "I/O Interfaces from Serial and Parallel to IEEE-1394 and USB"

Although most of the drives you would install in a PC are covered here, the primary emphasis is on hard disks and other devices using Parallel ATA (also called IDE), Serial ATA (SATA), or SCSI interfaces. For USB or FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, see Chapter 15.