Adding an old hard drive.

[Predator]

I have a 200 gig hard drive and I need to keep a lot of files before I reformat, about 30 gigs of files. I have an old hard drive with about 20 gigs of room left and i was wondering if I could add that hard drive as a 2nd drive, then transfer files on it and reformat my C:\ drive, how would I go about doing that?

 

 

 

I am on XP and the hard drive i am using is a Barracuda 7200.7 and the one i want to add is a Western Digital Wd4000 40 gigabyte hard drive. Sorry if I am missing information I don't knwo what toher info to give.

 

 

 

Thanks

[blade995]

You would need to hook it up to an IDE cable, assuming it's an IDE drive. If it's SATA, well then, hook it up to a SATA cable.

 

 

 

If you primary drive is IDE hook it up to the second plug on the ribbon cable. If you have an operating system installed on that old drive it should not be a problem but if it tries to boot from it go into the bios and change it. To get into the bios press the del key repeatedly when you start your computer.

[Predator]

Crap, um I think my 200 gb is ATA and the other one is for sure a IDE. So that means it wont work?

[blade995]

Crap, um I think my 200 gb is ATA and the other one is for sure a IDE. So that means it wont work?

 

 

 

No it will still work. You just have to plug the IDE drive into an IDE cable that then plugs into the motherboard.

 

 

 

If you don't have an extra IDE cable to dedicate to that drive you can put it on the same cable as your cd drive, which probably still uses IDE unless you have a fancy new drive that was only made a few months ago.

[Predator]

Oh, yah the person who i got it from gave me the cable that comes with it.

 

 

 

Would you by any chance be able to give me a guide on how to do this?

[Doomster]

There is confusion...

 

 

 

IDE is "intelligent drive electronics", representing the move of the drive controller onto the drive, with the computer side now being just a bus interface, so "IDE" and "ATA" (AT Attachment) are synonymous.

 

 

 

Old style ATA is now known as PATA (Parallel ATA) to distinguish it from the new style - SATA (Serial ATA).

 

 

 

Old style ATA also has different speed flavours, particularly that ATA/66 or above demands the use of an 80-wire cable, with extra ground wires seperating the signal wires to reduce crosstalk.

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, the main point is that old style ATA allows two drives per cable, operating as Master/Slave - and there may be more than one connection on the motherboard for them - the old way was to have two (each capable of two drives), and sometimes additional ones operated by a second controller - eg. RAID controller, while now, it's often down to one, or none.

 

 

 

Most (all?) 80 wire cables (Ultra ATA) are wired to support cable select, with the blus plug going to the motherboard, the black plug at the end as select master, and the brown one in the middle as select slave. With all drives jumper-selected as "CS", this makes swapping drives around a lot easier, otherwise you have to select them manually, as you would on a 40-wire cable that does not support select.

 

 

 

 

 

For manual jumpering:

 

 

 

One drive on a cable, should be set as MASTER (this is usually the default state with the select jumper in a parked position or missing) and should be set at the far end.

 

 

 

The second drive added to the cable must be set as slave, though the first drive could be re-assigned as slave and the second inserted as Master.

 

 

 

On a 40 wire cable, it is not essential to preserve the positioning (Master = end , Slave = middle), but I'd always insist on a single drive being at the end.

[blade995]

Although all that information above is relevant, he should not have to worry. If should not have to select the jumpers on the drive if it's the only IDE hard drive. Instaid of moving the jumpers on the hard drive, he can change the boot sequence in the bios which is much easier. You might not even have to do this, because motherboards usualy select to boot from SATA hard drives first.

 

 

 

The new style IDE (the 80pin cable) is probably what he has if his motherboard supports SATA.

[Predator]

uhh im still ocnfused. Also, I have a drive D:\ already with system files that came with the computer, would I still be able to have a 2nd hard drive?

 

 

 

Also, how do I exactly hook it up? Once I plug it in, do I go into boot menu and do something to like, install it?

[blade995]

uhh im still ocnfused. Also, I have a drive D:\ already with system files that came with the computer, would I still be able to have a 2nd hard drive?

 

 

 

Also, how do I exactly hook it up? Once I plug it in, do I go into boot menu and do something to like, install it?

 

 

 

You can have as many drive as you like (providing you have that many hookups)

 

 

 

You don't need to go into the boot menu, I only mentioned that as a precaution if the hard drive you are using has windows already installed and it boots of that drive instaid of your regular drive.

 

 

 

Just plug it in, start up your computer like you normal do, go to my computer and you should see another drive.