How to add a 2nd hard drive

[pantichd]

Hello,

I'm sure this is a really simple thing for someone who has done it before but I can't figure out what I need to do in order to add a 2nd hard drive to my pc.

I bought a new pc with a hard drive but I want to reuse the hard drive from my old pc.

I've installed it in the case, connected the power and data cable to it. But now I'm stuck. What next?

Can anyone point me to instructions/tutorials or something that'll help?

Thanks much!

 

[gargouille]

I thought you were shopping for a motherboard?

 

[chaps]

You will need to post more information. Type of machine, or motherboard and type of operating system on the harddrive. Normally as you boot up after installing the drive and cables-these must be plugged in properly aligning pin one etc. Depending on the machine you may have to hold down F1, or Delete, or f10, or some other key combination in order to access the bios to do the settings for the hard drive that you just installed. Most bios utilities have an auto detect feature that will find the drive, you may have an option, and you may not. A lot of the new bios setups are almost totally automatic.

Once you have the bios setup and have saved the changes the machine will restart and attempt to boot the hard drive that you just installed. Now here comes the fun part, depending upon the operating system version e.g. Window 98 will begin finding the board chipset and info and will attempt to reset, or setup drivers. It is best to have a boot disk and the Windows CD and then do a reinstall of the operating system on top of what is already there. Normally the correct board drivers will be installed and all of your old personal files etc. will be retained. This is however a risky and often troublesome procedure and will often require you to do several reboots and reinstalls, for the sound drivers, modem drivers, video drivers etc.

Now if you just want to add a second drive you will need to jumper the old drive as a slave in order to properly add it to you IDE cable unless you have a free cable with nothing else on it. You would need to then do the bios setup for the drive as described.

Note: the operating system difference between the two drives both need to be compatible in order for the primary drive to see the secondary drive.

Good Luck!

 

[pantichd]

I'm trying to do this on a Win98 machine. Not sure of the motherboard brand. Just curious, why is that important? I assumed the procedure only varied across operating systems not motherboards. But that might be my lack of experience.

 

[Kicket]

if you have both of ur hard drive in the same IDE cable( what u called data table), u need switch the jumper at the back of second hard drive to slave mod.

i assume u have a standard motherbard w/ 2 IDE connector, ur harddrive is the primary master and ur cd-rom(or what ever that is) is ur secondary master.

for how to switch the jumper u have to go to the harddrive's manufactory's website. Won't take u too long to figure it out.

ff

 

[chaps]

The motherboard/ machine information will give you an idea on how to access the bios, etc. The OS information will give you an Idea on setting up a second drive. Often the bios sees the second drive but when you boot up the OS doesn’t. Some times you may need to use a utility like EZ bios to allow you to properly access the secondary drive from the primary.

Jumper arrangements are different on different hard drives. Per IDE cable each drive must be jumpered correctly e.g. one is jumered as MASTER and one is jumpered as Slave. You also have the option of IDE CABLE SELECT. With this option the cable determines which drive becomes Master and which is SLAVE.

On the IDE cable you have pin arrangement to consider, most cables today are keyed so you cannot plug the cable in wrong. However some times you will find a cable or mother board socket that is not keyed and you will need to align pin one on the cable with pin one on the hard drive and pin one on the IDE controller, or pin one the motherboard socket.

The identified side of the IDE cable is e.g. a tracer, or color line or marking that indicates where pin one is located.

Mike