BIOS about the type of drive, its size, and other specifications. Today, nearly
all BIOS setups are capable of auto detecting IDE drives and determining their
specifications. Chapter 6 has scads more on BIOS.Read the instructions that come with the hard drive. If Autodetect is not avail-
able, go to the BIOS screen (reachable through a specific key combination
during bootup — read the manual to find out which keys to use and when to
press them) and identify the hard drive as a User Selected device. The manual
for the drive will tell you the capacity (in GB), the number of sectors per track,
the number of heads, and the number of cylinders in the drive. Some drives
and BIOS systems will ask for even more details — it’s all there in the instruc-
tion manual, but if you’re lucky you won’t need to go down this path and will
instead be able to use Auto Detect.Again, a modern drive should be able to automate the process or partitioning
the drive and then formatting it. If not, you can follow the instructions given
by Microsoft as part of Windows for the FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.EXE utilities.
Or, you can purchase a third-party automated partitioning and formatting
program.Although most modern BIOS programs have solved the problem certain
combinations of older machines and newer hard drives still are not fully com-
patible. You may have a 60GB hard drive (or so says the box it came in) but
the laptop only reports 24GB of available storage. The hard drive itself may
come with a utility that provides a means of breaking through the barrier of
an older machine; an alternate solution may involve treating the one large
physical drive as if it were two or more smaller logical drives. Consult your
hard drive maker for advice if you run into this problem and there’s not a
solution provided on a CD in the box.The Simplest Solution: External Add-ons..................................................
If your internal hard drive is too small or too slow, or (in some situations) if it
has ground to a halt, the simplest solution may be to add a tiny, low-power
external drive. External storage comes in four common types, all of them easy
to add on; you have to judge the cost, weight, and power consumption advan-
tages and disadvantages of each. Here are the four, in descending order of
capacity.USB external devices .........................................................................
The shelves of computer stores have begun to fill with fast, large, and inexpen-
sive external hard drives that attach to a USB port for an instant expansion of134 Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts