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adding a bigger harddrive
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Posted by: ronni50
Hello everyone from sunny Perth Western Australia. I am running out of room on my harddrive and want to put a bigger one in. Can I install a second one and still have access to my primary harddrive without to much trouble or is it better to reformat the new one, which would be a lot of hassle.
Thank you for any help you can give.
Posted by: uh...ok
Assuming you set things up correctly (namely, setting the new hard drive as a slave drive), you should be able to use a second drive without touching your first one.
When you install the new hard drive, the first thing you'll probably have to do is partition and format the thing. "Reformat" isn't quite the right word since you're really doing it for the first time.
Something that I sometimes suggest to people when they install new hard drives is to reinstall their OS on the new one - but that's only when the new drive is faster than the old one. This is a lot of added work though, because you'll basically have to reinstall everything from scratch on your new drive. But one thing that makes the whole processor easier is that you don't need to backup your old data until you choose to finally reformat your old hard drive - and that probably won't happen until you've moved everything over from the old drive to the new one.
Posted by: P0nix
Usually, by default your primary hard drive is set to "cable select" with the plastic jumper, setting the new drive (or keeping the new drive set) to "cable select" should be sufficient. If you get any problems, make sure your BIOS is detecting both hard drives (some systems like Dells force you to set the "ide channel" from "off" to "Auto" to recognize a new device. Also, if you can't see the new drive in windows after doing the above mentioned, but your BIOS sees the drive, then use a win98 boot disk and run the "fdisk" command to create a primary dos partition on the new drive. If you don't have a win 98 boot disk, no worries, just use your win xp cd as if setting up windows and quit out of setup after creating a partition on the second drive.
Hope this helps.
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