This guide is going to take you through simple step to changing your hard drive in a tower based PC. While this will apply to most modern and legacy PC’s this wont apply to laptop PC’s or some of the more modern, ultra compact systems on the market.

Steps

1. Static electricity can seriously damage the components inside a computer. To avoid this you must ensure you are grounded when operating inside your computer. One way to do this is to purchase an anti-static wrist strap which you should wear at all times. The wrist-strap plugs into an electrical socket which will automatically discharge the static electricity in your body (umm i think plugging yourself into an electrical socket might not be the best idea).
2. If you don’t have a solution for your static-electricity problems and really need to move ahead then every one minute touch the back of the tower where the metal is. The static from your body will go there.
3. The hard drive, also called a “hard disk” – is much like a filing cabinet. The programs and data are stored on the hard disk and the computer accesses them as they are needed. When the computer accesses the hard drive, it is reading and moving the stored information into the RAM memory. That memory is the temporary workspace. However, the original file is still on the hard disk and is left undisturbed until the file is saved.
4. When the computer stores or “saves” information, it writes the data to the hard disk. That process results in the old file being replaced or modified with the new information. If you save data to a new file, or install new software, the information is written to the disk in an available, unused portion of the disk.
5. Getting into the tower. Open both sides of computer case by removing screws at the back of the tower and sliding the panels off.
6. Removing the cables. Remove the data cables and power cables from the back of the old drive, make sure to write down on a piece of paper what cables go where as if you dont re-coonect the properly then your system wont work and you can cause serious damage!
7. Unscrewing the drive. The drive should be held in place by screws on both sides of the tower. Remove the screws with one hand supporting the drive. Once the screws are removed slide the drive out of its holder. Some drives are on clip based sleds, in which case you can unclip the sleds and slide the drive out.
8. Some drives use jumpers, little bacl clips the size of a ant that are used to configure the drive. You will need to match the jumpers. Once the old drive is removed, look at the position of the jumper on the drives rear. This jumper tells the drive whether it is the computer’s main drive or auxiliary drive, so you must make sure that the new drive’s jumper is in the same position as the old one.
9. Install the hard drive. screw the drive in (or slide it back in if its on a sled) and replace the data and power cables. Then replace the tower’s side panels.
10. Re-install your operating system, software and data. When you have switched the computer on you will have to re-install all your software. Start with the operating system then all the others you require in any order. On a PC the operating system is generally Windows, on a newer Mac it is generally Mac OS X.

Things You’ll Need

• A phillips screwdriver
• A hard drive
• An anti-static wrist strap (Is not needed but if you have it you can use it)(dont forget to plug the thing into an electrical socket LOL)
• A software CD For your pc

Tips

• You can always use a utility like PC Ghost which will do a complete, binary back of your old drive that you can use to restore your new drive in exactly the same state the old drive was in.

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