Re: OEM hard drive questions

Guys, thanks for all of the responses!

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Kurt Anderson <kjanderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

You have an extra cable but you haven't installed a SATA hard drive
before? Makes me wonder why you have a cable then. Just because I
don't know your knowledge of the subject, the SATA cable is different
than an IDE cable. At the wiki you can see the mobo plug.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Actually, I've *seen* them, just haven't installed one. And I should have
clarified that my son told me that he has the cable, although, thanks to
your comment, I'm going to pursue that with him further just to be sure.

I don't know about "having" to format the hard drive, but you might as
well (imo). When you plug it in and start Windows, the OS should
recognize the new drive. You can also manage your hard drives in the
Management Console (in Vista this is accessible via right-clicking the
"My Computer" icon - maybe the same in XP?)

Based on David's comment, I'm guessing I will have to format. Not a
problem. Is there any reason why I should choose FAT32 over NTFS? (FWIW,
this is an internal drive used on a WinXP SP3 install.)

Thanks again!
Dan