storage drive

[showtime1959]

how can i make my second drive a storage i have 250 gig western digital and a 160 gig maxtor, how do i set the jumpers ,also do i need to put a opersting system on the storage drive

 

[vacunita]

The drives should have a little label attached to it with the jumper settings. If not you can laways gpo the manufactuers website, and they will have the jumper settings.
Set the one that will be the main drive as master, and set the storage drive as slave.

No operating system is necessary on the storage drive.

boot into your operating system, and it should be picked up, provided its formatted.


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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Freestone]

Lots of questions before you can get to your desired goal.

Since you are asking about jumpers, we have to make the assumption that we are dealing with IDE drives. This being the case, we have to know which of the two drives you are currently booting from, the 160GB or the 250GB?

Next, how many IDE controllers does your motherboard have? Two used to be the norm, but newer boards, favoring SATA drives, are coming with only one, and some with none at all.

If you have only one, and have a CD/RW or DVD drive, then you would have to remove that, as IDE supports only two devices per controller. An alternative would be to purchase a PCI IDE controller card to provide additional IDE controllers.

Basic IDE jumpering is either one device set to Master and the other Slave, or both devices set to Cable Select. If you are going to use Cable Select, then the Master drive will be the drive that is connected to the end of the IDE cable, furthest from the motherboard. The slave drive will be connected to the middle connector. When using Master/Slave jumpering, good practice says to place the drives the same way on the cable, though not strictly necessary

The IDE drive you are booting from is usually the primary controller Master. Your storage drive can be a Slave on the same cable, or set to Master or Slave on the secondary controller, if you have one, and depending on if another device is on that cable. Practice used to be to always make a hard drive Master and any optical drive, like a CD-ROM drive, slave as the CD-ROM drive would slow the hard drive transfer rates, but newer technology employs Independent Device Timings, so this practice has been relaxed.

If you tell us how many IDE controllers are in your system, and how things are currently attached (i.e. current hard drive is alone or has a CD or DVD drive attached), it'll be easier to answer your question.

The storage drive does not need an Operating System installed, but will need to be partitioned and formatted. These steps can be performed after installation.

 

[showtime1959]

i have a dell 4600 my problem is when i try to install the os sytem ,its to hit F1 OR F2 setup well what happens is every time i hit the F1 key it starts to install the os system all over again ,why did this come about how can i start my computor without having to hit the F 1 KEY ALL THE TIME

 

[showtime1959]

to add a storage drive do io format it before or after i add the drive

 

[wahnula]

every time i hit the F1 key it starts to install the os system all over again

Showtime1959,

Having a little trouble understanding your situation. I think you are trying to clean install an OS and then add a storage drive. Simplest way:

1. Plug OS drive ONLY into PC
2. Go into BIOS, set that hard drive as first boot device, CD-ROM second boot device
3. Boot to Windows CD, install windows
4. Attach new storage drive & format MAKE SURE YOU ARE FORMATTING THE CORRECT DRIVE you should be able to tell by the size (GB).

If, every time the machine starts, you are asked to reset BIOS settings(not sure but this may be the F1 prompt you are getting) then remove and replace the CMOS battery, a small shiny coin-size battery in the mainboard.

Tony