Swapping Hard Drives Between Computers

Hard drive prices are continually dropping while the storage capacity of the drives increases. You can now obtain a hard drive over one terabyte in size (one thousand gigabytes). If you have a smaller hard drive installed on your computer and want to increase the size of your storage space, you may want to swap out your current hard drive for a newer, larger one.

Instructions:

1: Power down the computer and remove all of the cables connected to the CPU (the tower of the computer).

2: Remove the Phillips screws around the side of the case.

3: Slide the case off to expose the interior of the CPU. Identify the current hard drive. It is, most likely, stored near the top front of the computer and has two wires coming out of it: one thin and small, the other a few inches wide and skinny.

4: Remove the screws holding the current hard drive in place. There are four screws attached to a metal plate which holds the hard drive in the computer. Once the screws are removed, you can slide out the hard drive. Make sure to remove the cables from the hard drive when you take it out of the computer.

5: Insert the new hard drive into the old drive's space and reattach the four screws to lock the drive down. Connect the two cables into the rear of the drive. The small cable connects the drive to the power source while the fat cable connects the drive to the motherboard.

6: Close the computer case back up and reattach the cables and the screws on the exterior of the CPU.

7: Power on the computer and insert the operating system installation disk into the CD drive. When asked what to boot from, select the CD drive. Follow the prompts to install the operating system onto the new hard drive. This process generally takes several hours to complete.

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