Installing a second HD to my 8200 Diminsion

I need help on installing a 320 gig Western Digital to my stock Dell Diminsion 8200. I currently have a 80 gig WD. Which would be the best way to set it up?

Hello oscardana,  HERE  is the link to the Dell site for the information on your system.

It shows your system supports IDE hard drives, and can accept two hard drives.

If you add a 320GB hard drive, you must be running Windows with at least SP1 in order to recogonize and use any capacity over 137GBs.

You have only two IDE connectors, so IDE channel two is probably used for the optical drive(s) so the new drive would need to be set up as Cable Select (CS) and you can leave the original 80 GB drive in the system as a backup drive. 

The 80 GB drive should have the jumper pin set as the 320GB drive (CS).

The 320 GB drive should be connected to the end connector on the ribbon cable and the 80 GB drive connected to the middle connector of the ribbon cable.

You may need to enter the BIOS and let it recogonize the new drive setup and make sure they are all enabled.

You then would need to install the OS on the new hard drive or migrate the data from the original drive.

This may or may not be an option, depending on the new hard drive and other considerations.

If you do a fresh OS install, which I recommend, you would then need to install all the drivers for the system, after the OS install, starting with the chipset drivers first.

This appears to be a lot to deal with, but it is really not all that hard to accomplish.

Hope this helps.