Guide to installing (second) hard drive?

continuing adventures in hardware

[deejay]

Well... after my PC, (aka Wally), threw a fit and fell over a week ago I ended up buying a new box, (aka Brian).

Wally was relegated to organ donor, and has given his peripherals and modem to Brian.

Brian, although physically 10-times what Wally was, is still rather brainless. He has a large hard drive and Windows XP installed, but not a lot else.

Wally, though now without a body, still has a brain. It turns out his hard drive survived the crash, and in fact it's his brain that I am using right now plugged into Brian's body.

You might have guessed I'm no wiz with hardware, so I hired the guy from the shop to come out and get the system fired up for me.. with the idea of setting up Brian's new hard drive running WinXP as the main hard drive, and Wally's old hard drive plugged in so I could access it as a drive letter through Explorer, eg, like a CD or floppy.

Well, it looks like I've just waited a week and paid him $60 to drink my beer and install a couple of drivers. Hell, I coulda done that for myself.

Right now I can have one hard drive plugged in or the other, but not both... so I can have stable, fast and brainless or I can have rickety, sluggish and all my files.

Can anyone direct me to a tutorial or something that will walk me through installing a second hard drive? I need to be able to get the new XP drive to see the old drive so I can access my files.

Any help appreciated.

*muttering 'bout shoulda just done this a week ago*

[digitalghost]

Sounds like you need to designate master and slave. Those jumper settings should be listed in the manual for the new box, they may appear on the drives themselves.

For a quick quide, check out this [techtv.com] from TechTv.

[dcheney]

Much depends on the interface used by the Wally drive and the new drive. If they are both IDE (likely) then it shouldn't be a problem. (Most systems allow 4 ide devices, but don't forget that cdrom/dvd/zip etc. are also ide typically.)

[deejay]

need to designate master / slave < - yes, definitely :) thanks for the link digitalghost, I'll check it out.

dcheney, yep, they're both IDE.

I have a CDRW on one IDE strappy thing, and then on the other IDE strappy thing I have the hard drive I'm switching back and forth. Then there's another strappy thing that looks like the first two, but isn't quite as wide that the floppy is on.

ps.. they don't make these damn straps long enough... I'm gonna have to shift everything around. :(

[ncsuk]

Take both the hard drives out the machine.

The IDE cable (strappy thing) should have 3 ports on it. 1 goes into the motherboard and the other 2 are for the hard drives.

Look at the back of both the hard disks and you will see a little tab in some pins. Look at the bottom of the hard disk and there will probably be a diagram like this.

: : :
CS SL MS

You want the tab on the main hard drive in the MS pins and you want the second drive in the SL pins.

Then simply wack the cable back in and slot them back in the PC.

Turn on the PC and goto the BIOS by pressing delete and then have a look around and find the section that allows you to change the hard drive config. Basically let it detect them automatically and if it finds them then save the settings and reboot the machine.

Finished happy chrsitmas

Gaz

[le_gber]

On your motherboard you should have 2 big male port and 1 smaller. the smaller should be linked to the floppy. the 2 big are for HD's and CDRW's. You have one primary and one secondary port (should be printed on the MotherBoard next to the port in sometimes very small ;) ).

What I did with mine is link the 2 HD's (with small stripe) together with 1 master and 1 slave, and then 2 CDRW's with long one with Master and Slave as well (with long stripe).

Have the masters as main compomnents, ie main HD and CDRW and slaves as secondary HD and just CDR. Make sure to have one master and on slave on each strip and not both being the same (ie both master or both slaves)

Then plug the HD combo in primary slot on MotherBoard and the CDRW combo in the secondary slot.

Don't close you box until it works ... save a lot of time if it doesn't ... the first times it NEVER works ;)

Then launch your pc and go into BIOS, usually by pressing the delete key on your keyboard (I think that it F8 fo HP boxes), and configure the auto detection (like ncsuk told you). if you everything has been configured properly it should work (but it NEVER works properly the first time ;) )

Then once you modified the config and it works you are a happy man (and it's usually time to go to sleep or eat because you spent 4 hours tearing your pc appart and rebuilding it :) )

The best way to learn is to do it yourself - and it's great because after that YOU can help other with similar pbs - helped my friend a couple of weeks ago, very rewarding :)

and GOOD LUCK, I know what you're going through ;) ...
Leo

[2oddSox]

For $69 (plus GST) you can get a USB cradle to wrap poor Wally's brain in, and access it externally thru Explorer (you just pop Wally into this cradle and plug the cradle into your USB drive on the outside of the machine). This essentially leaves Brian to be Brian, and Wally is alive and kicking. If you're just wanting to access the data, and are completely tech-phobic, this is a pretty easy way to go. It also makes moving data from one PC to another extremely easy.

If you want to go internal, to test things out you can substitute the CDRW connection for Wally/Brian (disconnect the CD and connect Wally/Brian) and you should be able to see the drive thru Explorer. If you follow that strappy thing back to the Motherboard, you'll probably see a spare connector alongside it. You can plug another strappy thing into that and connect it to the CDRW or Wally/Brian if you want them all to co-habit. Follow ncsuk's and le_gber's advice and you'll be home and hosed, and the beer will still be there.

Good luck,

2odd...

[deejay]

hehe... you guys make it sound so easy... I'm almost convinced.

I'm about to shut down and get some sleep here.. far to cross-eyed right now to try anything.. but one question before I go.

The tutorials I've found so far, including the one dg left, say you have to format the new drive once it is installed. Is that because they are talking about a new out-of-the box drive, or does that apply to all drives?

Objective is to get to my data.. not format it out of existence. :0

Thanks so much for all the help.

[deejay]

hiya 2oddsox.

Refresh my memory.. you're a kiwi? so that would be $69 NZ? *hopeful* from a chain that might have an outlet in Hawke's Bay? *more hopeful*

:)

[2oddSox]

Deejay,

DO NOT FORMAT! You'll lose all data!

Yep, I'm a Kiwi. Yep, $NZ. The crowd I use is e-one.co.nz - I'm on a trade deal, so maybe a few bucks more for the great unwashed, and I'm sure they ship even as far as from AKL to Hawke's Bay :)

2odd...

[le_gber]

Yep do not format or you'll loose everything and you don't wanna do that :)

I think the best thing to do is to transfer all your data from wally to brian, then format brian in NTFS (new fat format used by win XP - you can use both but NTFS seems more stable and allows more data/cluster - I think ;) ) and then may be put all secondary data back on Brian ...

Odd2 the usb thingy sound really good...

Leo

[deejay]

Well, I took the plunge last night and I'm pleased to announce

BRIAN LIVES!

*happy grin* Thank you all for your help. It was as easy as you said, and took all of about 15 minutes once I had looked up the jumper info.

Brian's HD is now my C: drive, and Wally's old HD is the slave E: drive. It took all of another five minutes to copy over all my files, and I think I actually slept soundly last night for the first time in a couple of weeks.

2oddsox: Thanks for the tip on that USB device.. I can see myself ending up with one in the near future. And thanks for the tip on e-one! I ran across them when I was looking for parts for Wal, but I tend to be very cautious... knowing someone who has dealt with them makes all the difference.

le_gber - yep, I think that'll be on the cards for next week when I've had a chance to verify that I've got everything I need.

hehe... I think I'm getting over my fear of hardware... look out world...

[le_gber]

Glad you sorted it out - well done :)

next step: building a server to host your friends' sites ;)

leo