How hard is it to install a second hard drive???

[Memnoch]

OK, I think I've turned the oven on and am starting to cook with gas. Thanks to EVERYONE who posted here for their help!!!!

I managed to complete Step 1 - get my system booting up from the original 20GB HD (which I think I will keep as the original to make things simple) by making it the Master and plugging it into the HD1 end of the IDE cable, and disconnecting the IDE cable for the 80GB HD (which I will use as my slave hopefully). So Windows XP Home boots up ok etc, in other words I am back to where I was at the BEGINNING.

Now my next challenge is to install the SECOND hard drive (the 80GB one) as a slave. When I first booted up the other HD it seemed as though he tried to copy my files across to that drive, and I think that's where WinXP Pro (the pirate one I want to get rid of) is installed.

So if I understood everyone's advice correctly, what I need to do is this:

1. Set the Jumper settings on that drive to SLAVE (I think I'm short one jumper thing though)
2. plug it into the HD2 plug of the IDE cable (NOT the one at the end)
3. Format it (I assume I will use Windows XP Home to do this? Also, do I need to partition it etc? How do you do this??)

I'll wait around for some replies before I do anything. Thanks again for everyone's help.

[WOLFGIR]

Make sure you have the second drive as slave in the jumper, and also check your bios as you start up and make it autodetect. If you want to partition it, well, I would either try the f-disc but it can be a bugger frankly, or try partition magic, or just skip it. I have a 60 GB drive at home, and no problem, takes alittle longer to do the defrags only..

If you get it to start and to boot from the right, (shouldn´t be any problems) just open thid computer, right click the 80 GB one and choose format drive)
Voila.

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by WOLFGIR: Make sure you have the second drive as slave in the jumper, and also check your bios as you start up and make it autodetect. If you want to partition it, well, I would either try the f-disc but it can be a bugger frankly, or try partition magic, or just skip it. I have a 60 GB drive at home, and no problem, takes alittle longer to do the defrags only.. If you get it to start and to boot from the right, (shouldn´t be any problems) just open thid computer, right click the 80 GB one and choose format drive) Voila.

OK, I've been reading Willow's Partition Magic thread with interest since I'm wondering if it's worth partitioning my 80GB slave drive. What are the pros and cons? Keep in mind that my 20GB c: drive is where my OS (WinXPHome) is, as well as my other apps. I want to use the 80GB mainly for other apps, music, etc.

[Night Stalker]

Memnoch

I formated my 80G to 4 16G plus a fifth with the leftover to keep the block size down. I didn't like the idea of a 1K file taking up 32K or 64K on the HD.

[andrewas]

I woudnt bother with partitioning. It can help you keep things organised, work on one and games on the other and so forth, but there are nor real speed advantages. It used to be that partitions had a maximum size depending on filesystem, but FAT32 supports up to 2 terabytes so thats not a problem anymore. NTFS has no limit that I know of.

The only partitioning I would recommend is a 5gig for the OS, since that way you can safely reformat your OS partition without destroying data and saves, although youll still need to re-install programmes. (You could back up the relevant parts of the registry, but in most cases its registry problems that force the re-install).

On cluster size. The principle is simple - the HDD is in clusters, each file take up a whole number of clusters. Therefore a 1 byte file takes up one cluster, which means that programmes with loads of small files waste a large proportion of their space. The larger the partition, the more space wasted.

But on an 80Gb drive I woudnt worry about a difference that is only about 100Mb maximum.

[Hexa]

Oh wel hope u fix it and hope it isn't contageous because I will be installing anew harddisk and some new memory tomorrow!@ [/QB]

Well I can tell u it wasn't contageous...my new harddisk is spinning like a kitten!@
[img]smile.gif[/img]

[Memnoch]

OK...I got step 1 done, which was to get my 20GB HD working, but I come up with the following problem when installing my second one (the 80GB) as the slave:

"The following file is corrupt or missing: /Windows/System32/config/system"

or something like that. It tells me to put in the WinXP Home CD in and repair the file, but when I put in either my WinXP Home Upgrade disc or the WinXP Home Install disc it doesn't boot from the CD anyway.

I thought it might be a jumper setting...this is the HD that I am trying to install:

IBM Deskstar
ICL35080AVVA07-0

I'm pretty sure it's 16-heads, and when I use the Slave jumper settings for it the problem above happens. These are the settings I used:

*::[:][:]

According to what was on the label.

I tried using some other settings (Auto Spin Disable, etc) but then the drive doesn't even get recognized.

Anyone have any ideas?

[andrewas]

This is normally the point where I say "Hold it, Ill be over in an hour", but thats not an option in this case. (I do have a free week coming up if you fancy paying for it )

Some thoughts. There is a master on that channel right? Some BIOS will detect a slave without a master, but ive never seen one work correctly.

Try putting the 80Gb in where your 20Gb is - same settings, same cable. If that fails you know youve got a dead drive.

In any case, you shoudnt be having an HDD as slave, you want both HDDs to be masters on different channels, with the CD-ROMS as slaves.

And in order to boot from CD, you need to change the boot sequence in BIOS.

[Memnoch]

OK, let me try that...I'll make the HDD80GB a master on the other channel (how do you tell what channel something is, anyway? I assume it's by the fact that it's on a different cable?) and make my CD-ROM a slave on the first channel (where the 20GB HD is). I know the drive isn't dead because when I first checked to see how the dude had @#$% it up it booted up, using WinXP Professional.

Thanks for following this, and I'll let you know how I go (it's turned into something bigger than Ben Hur!!).

[Hexa]

Originally posted by andrewas: In any case, you shoudnt be having an HDD as slave, you want both HDDs to be masters on different channels, with the CD-ROMS as slaves.

And why not .. I have it installed like that with no problems ...
80 GB HD as masters with another 80GB harddisk as slave
ReWriters as master and DVD player as slave

That way u cn burn on the fly more easily as well ...