2nd hard drive

[Abax]

Hi All,
First time on the forum so please bear with me and hope that all goes well,question!
I've got a spare 8gig hard drive that is formatted but has three partitions on it,how do i take the partitions off and then install the HDD as a slave drive,how do i configure it when i plug it in ,or is it an automatic thing? any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Alan

[Moz]

Hi Abax...

Erm right, I reckon the easiest way to do this would be to physically install the hard drive into the computer as a slave. Do this using the small jumper selectors at the very back of the drive, next to where the cable plugs in. there should be a set of about 8 pins, 4columns in 2 rows.
Just above these, perhaps on the plastic bit, or maybee on a sticker on the top of the drive, should be a "legend" guide thing, which will say something alond the lines of:
CSL SL MA
These mean Cable Select, Slave and Master respectively. To set the drive you are installing to Slave, you need to "join" the two slave pins together to form a circuit. Don't bend the pins to do this, there should be a jumper connector thing which you can push over the two pins... I havn't explained that very well, but if you have a look at the back of the drive you should see what I mean, but I must stress don't go bending any pins!
Oh, you might want to note the drive information which should be on a sticker on the top of the drive, cylinders, heads etc... you may need them.

You should also check that the current hard drive you have in has its' jumpers set to Master (and not cable select as this may cause problems). Plug the IDE and power cables into the hard drive and we should be all set for turning on the system.

OK, now hopefully when you turn on the BIOD automatically recognises your new addition, and you'll get something like:


IDE Primary Master: <whatever your current HD is>
IDE Primary Slave: <Whatever the new drive is>

If you get the Primary Master come up OK but not the slave you can try a couple of things:
a) manually put the information into the BIOS settings about the new hard drive (which is the cylnder information, heads etc) and try again
b) move the new hard drive to the other IDE cable in the computer, but I think you'll need to set the jumpers to master for it to work properly (each Hard drive will be a "master" on it's own IDE cable then)

Right so you can see the Hard drive in the initial boot up screen. By what you've said the drive is formatted (and Im assuming for Windows 95/98, not Linux or NT or anything?) so you'll be able to see it OK as new drives in windows.

Now you can either leave the drive as it is (I have different partitions for music, photoshop/image stuff and CD-Images) or if you want you can re-parition the drive into one big one using some partitioning software. I'd definately recommend Partition Magic, it's fairly easy to use and robust, but you do have to pay for it (goto here (http://www.partitionmagic.com) for more details). I think there's one preinstalled with Windows called Fdisk or something but I'm not 100% sure..

I hope this has answered some of your questions! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif


------------------
moz@david-morris.net

[This message has been edited by Moz (edited 01-23-2001).]

[Dinosaur]

Partition Magic is a wonderful utility, but is most useful when you want to resize and/or move partitions without losing the data in them. You can make a partition smaller in order to make room for an extra partition.

Fdisk (or a similar utility) is available with every OS I have ever seen. It will delete and/or create partitions. If you do not care about the data, Fdisk is all you need. After deleting partitions with Fdisk, use Format Utility to format drive. Format utility is also avaialbe with your OS.

------------------
Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.