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10. If it is not already connected, connect the other
end of the EIDE cable to the IDE1 connector on
the system board.
CAUTION: You must match the colored strip
on the EIDE cable with pin 1 on the IDE1 con-
nector to avoid possible damage to your system.
To locate the IDE1 connector, see Figure 6-1.
11. Replace the computer cover. Then reconnect your
computer and peripherals to their power sources,
and turn them on.
12. Insert a bootable diskette (such as the Dell Diag-
nostics Diskette) into drive A, and turn on the
computer system.
13. Enter the System Setup program, and update the
appropriate Drive category (0 or 1) under Drives:
Primary.
See "Drives: Primary and Secondary" in Chapter 2.
After you update the System Setup settings, reboot
the system.
14. Partition and logically format your drive, as
described in the next subsection, before proceed-
ing to the next step.
15. Test the hard-disk drive by running the Hard-
Disk Drive(s) Test Group in the Dell Diagnostics.
See your Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Guide for
information on running the Dell Diagnostics and
troubleshooting any problems that may occur.
16. Install your operating system on the hard-disk
drive.
Refer to the documentation that came with your
operating system.
Partitioning and Logically Formatting
Your EIDE Hard-Disk Drive
EIDE hard-disk drives must be physically formatted, par-
titioned, and logically formatted before they can be used
to store data. Every hard-disk drive from Dell is physi-
cally formatted before it is sent to you.
NOTE: On systems with hard-disk drives larger than
2 gigabytes (GB), create a primary partition of 2 GB and
divide the remaining capacity into partitions of 2 GB or
7-10
Dell OptiPlex GXa Mini Tower Systems Reference and Installation Guide
less. For example, a system with a 2.5-GB hard-disk
drive would have a primary partition of 2 GB (drive C)
and a second partition of 500 megabytes (MB) (drive D).
Hard-disk drives must be partitioned this way because
MS-DOS–based operating systems (including
Windows NT when using a file allocation table [FAT]
16 file system) do not support drive partitions larger than
2 GB.
To partition and logically format your hard-disk drive,
use the program(s) offered by your operating system.
For MS-DOS, use the fdisk and format commands to
perform these procedures. The fdisk and format com-
mands are described in the MS-DOS reference
documentation.
For OS/2, see the discussion on partitioning and logical
formatting in the documentation that came with the oper-
ating system.
CAUTION: If you format your hard-disk drive
under the OS/2 High Performance File System
(HPFS), you cannot reformat the drive for
MS-DOS without losing all HPFS data. See your
OS/2 documentation for details.
For Windows NT, see the discussion on partitioning and
logical formatting in the documentation that came with
the operating system.
CAUTION: If you format your hard-disk drive
under the Windows NT File System (NTFS), you
cannot reformat the drive for MS-DOS without los-
ing all NTFS data. See your Windows NT
documentation for details.
®
For the UNIX
operating system, refer to your UNIX
documentation.
I
nstalling SCSI Devices
To use SCSI devices in your Dell computer, you must
have a SCSI host adapter card, which comes with its own
SCSI cable. This cable can be used to attach a variety of
SCSI devices (hard-disk drives, tape drives, and so on).
The SCSI host adapter configures the devices attached to
it as one subsystem—not as independent devices.
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