Installing hard drive

[Tylerjohn]

I'm looking to install a hard drive in My older Dell Dimension 8250 PC. The existing drive is getting noisy and it will be a great chance to clean the machine up a bit and improve it's performance.( For $50 for a western digital HD I thought this unit worth it as it has served me well) Anyway my cousin is going to help me and I want to be prepared for the switch. He said we will leave the existing drive in and then once the new drive is formatted and has an OS we will start switching over my material. The hard drive from Newegg didn't come with cables so should I presume I need a power cable and an IEDE cable. I'm not sure if this motherboard has a second
EIDE input for the second drive or if I will need one of those jumper type cables. Sorry for rambling but I'm just hoping to keep this from becoming a computer beating, they bite. Any tips would be great.

 

[Alex Ethridge]

You most likely have extra molex (power) cables for the additional drive. I've never seen one that didn't. As for the IDE (2-inch-wide) ribbon cable, you may need one with three connectors, one on each end for the main board and the old hard disk and another connector in the middle of the cable for the new disk.

Dell is bad about shipping computers with only one hard disk and using what I call a half cable (connector for only one hard disk).

By the way, you may find vast differences in cost from location to location on the ribbon cable so shop around. I once had a guy attempt to charge me $22 for an IDE cable. At that time, the low and high prices I was running into were 99 cents to six dollars. There was an idiot in the room and I believe the idiot was the one who thought I was an idiot.

I get new ones with main boards all the time and I have accumulated so many I have started throwing them away. There may be some shops around your area that will pass one on to you at a give-away price, or even free.

 

[replay]

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim8250/replace.htm#1107395

 

[Tylerjohn]

Perfect link for the job description as Dell does use a single cable with 3 connectors and the jumpers on the drives need to be set properly. Great help.