Installing a HD from SCRATCH

A neighbor of mine got "ticked" off at his old computer and gave it to me. I removed his HD for him and give it to him as he still had all his data on it.

I have never installed a HD from "scratch ". It appears all I have to do is buy a new HD, partiton it and install an OS. Is this all that difficult? I've installed an OS before but I have never partitioned a HD. Just what needs to be done when installing a BRAND NEW HD from scratch?

BTW he has new Dell 8200 series computer.

 

Just hook it up, set the BIOS to auto detect the hard drive, boot up with a floppy.
Now, ask yourself this, do I want partitions? If it is a large drive this would be a good idea when it comes to scandisk, defrag, or your files if you need to reformat c: drive, with the logical drive(s) unaffected. I use 4 partitions, myself.
Run fdisk, press y for large disk support, create the primary partition, set it's size if you want to partition or leave it alone if not, and set it to be the active partition.
Then create an extended partition, and then you will be able to create the logical drive(s), setting the sizes until the hard drive space is used up.
Exit out of fdisk when done and reboot.
Format drives
format x: [x being the drive]
Then boot up with cd support, note the drive letter for the cdrom
while it is booting. Install OS.
You might need the drivers for your hardware.