hi adding a hard drive (I know nothing)

Okay. I got a new computer. Good gravy, it's been a while. My old computer was pretty wussy when I bought it on September 3rd, 1999. It's not bad, but it needs more space. It's only got 30GB, which is certainly not enough.

So I thought I'd stick in the 30 gig box from my old computer, which I obtained a little less than a year ago. It has ALL of my awesome media. That's MP3s, that's videos, that's the pictures from Kalen's trip to Cali (although I can easilly get those back). That's also my FTP info for everything and it'd just be really convienient if I could get THAT hard drive, with everything on it, into THIS computer.

I've thought of just networking them and giving the other to my sister, which is what I'll end up doing if there's no possible way to do what I want. But I REALLY want that extra 30 gigs for this computer.

Went into it with very little knowledge, as I usually do. Yanked out HD from old computer, made sure the Jumpers on both hard drives were set correctly, stuck old hard drive into new computer. Computer didn't like it one bit. Had to turn off the old hard drive in order to boot into windows. I am dumb. Any help would be appreciated.

Did you set one as master and one as slave? Then plug them both into the same IDE cable. I don't remember if the master or the slave has to be on the connecter on the cable that's closest to the motherboard. Make sure the cables aren't hooked in the HDs upside down, sometimes you can jam it in the wrong way. Maybe sure power cables are plugged into both HDs. I only mention all these things because they're things I've forgotten to do myself. Does it boot to the BIOS when both are plugged in? If so go check IDE configuration in there, it'll show which drives it's recognizing and which it isn't, so maybe that'll help you figure out where the problem is. Maybe try booting with just the second HD, to make sure the drive isn't destroyed or something. My strategy is usually to randomly plug things in and flip jumpers until something works, so I'm not the best person to give advice I guess.

I think (Squally or c_l correct me if I'm wrong) that it's because both have a working windows OS on them. So, get your hands on Partition Magic (I don't know if Boot magic will do the job), and run it from DOS. There, on the second HD, turn off the "bootable" option.
It should solve the problem.

Sorry, didn't make it clear that the old hard drive didn't have the OS on it; just files and whatnot. I have a 3GB HD on the other computer on which Windows 98 is located.

BIOS only recognizes the new HD, but it also recognizes my tears, and I recognize its laughter. I have half a mind to allow it to recognize my sledge hammer.

You can probably also do it from the BIOS config. You know, hit F1 or some other F key when your computer boots up to get to the BIOS screen. From there go to a tab called "Boot" (most likely) and choose which devices you want to boot when your computer starts up and don’t let your slave drive boot up. That should do it. At least I’ve been able to do it like that.

Here’s a neat trick after you get both your hard drives working nicely. Instead of having the swap file, paging file or virtual memory (whatever it’s called) on the primary drive, make the file on the slave drive. It’ll considerably speed up your computers performance since it can store stuff in virtual memory on the slave drive while your doing you high-end stuff on your main drive.

EDIT: Just saw your above post. Nevermind then.

The slave has to be on the IDE connector closest to the motherboard.

Is there any more info you can provide? You *should* be able to connect any 30 GB hard drive to a current computer by slaving it to your master hard drive. I'd say double-check the jumpers, but I'm sure you'd *never* have both jumpered as masters.

Try using Cable Select, maybe. (If your jumpers are labelled, it should say MA, SL, and CS. If you put both on CS, it should automatically read the HDD at the end of your IDE cable as the master and the one in the middle of the cable as your slave.

Also be sure that your IDE cable isn't plugged in backwards. (Upside-down like Unne said *should* be impossible, as any decent IDE cable has a tab on it to prevent that. The red line along one end of the IDE cable goes to pin one. (Pin one is usually on the left-hand side of the IDE port, but it should be labelled in any case)

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Originally posted by Gareas
The slave has to be on the IDE connector closest to the motherboard.

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Not true, if you happen to be using shielded IDE cable (as I am), the master and slave swap around (unless you use cable select, then who cares) :)

Anyway, did you make sure both drives had a power cable (the one with a black, 2 yellow, and a red wire) as well as the normal IDE cable?


Since it's a fairly old machine, you may also have to go into the BIOS to change something, it's probably got the primary slave set to Disabled instead of Autodetect if it's previously unused, so you'll have to change that to auto-detect instead. (Although having all 4 of Primary/Secondary Master/Slave on autodetect isn't a bad idea, regardless of whether anything's actually plugged in there or not.)

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You can probably also do it from the BIOS config. You know, hit F1 or some other F key when your computer boots up to get to the BIOS screen.

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DEL key for me :p In any case, it should say what key to press unless you've gone and disabled that in the BIOS.

I managed to jam an IDE connecter into one of my CD drives upside-down. The tab doesn't do much good if the drive is built with a hole on the top and the bottom.

I used Cable Select on the new hard drive and the old hard drive started working. *no idea*

I <3 u Bleys. Thanks everyone. >=D

*media bliss*

*guess the drive was set to single drive master, if it was apparently set as master correctly before*

Nice to re-affirm that I'm God.