Tips on installing my new HDD 2TB?

Soldato
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I have just bought a Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Internal HDD.

It will be used as a secondary HDD - my primary is a WD6400AAKS.

Do i just plug and play? Im running XP SP3 and i might like to partition the drive in half, not sure yet - which is a decent program to do this?

Also should i run a program to make sure there aren't any defects/ bad sectors on the hdd?

Anything else i should do?

cheers.
 
Soldato
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I have just bought a Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Internal HDD.

Woo

Do i just plug and play? Im running XP SP3 and i might like to partition the drive in half, not sure yet - which is a decent program to do this?

Yep, hook it up to your PC. When you load into Windows it will see it right away. You can partition it through Windows. Right-click on Computer then click Manage. Under the Storage heading you will see Disk Management.

Right-click on the 2TB disk and click New Volume. Choose the size etc and then send it to do it. Repeat with any free space if your first volume was smaller than the disk.

Also should i run a program to make sure there aren't any defects/ bad sectors on the hdd?

I am sure something like HDTune can check this, though never done it myself.

Anything else i should do?

For the love of god make sure you are formatting the correct HDD! :p
 
Associate
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Yes you will need to use it - the jumper is only an option if you are only going to have one big partition.
I've partitioned and formatted mine on a win7 system, which does the correct alignment automatically, so have never had to use wdalign, but gather it should be run after partitioning.
 
Soldato
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Actually it would appear the jumper is only if you intend to install XP to one big partition. Otherwise it isn't required at all even if you have one partition as a secondary drive.

It would seem you partition and format the drive how you want it, then run the WD Align tool.
 
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Actually it would appear the jumper is only if you intend to install XP to one big partition.
I think we're saying the same thing about the jumper.

Otherwise it isn't required at all even if you have one partition as a secondary drive.
I'm afraid I don't quite follow what you're saying here - as far as I knew, the 'rules' for using wdalign were the same on secondary drives.
 
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