adding a second hard drive

[thejackal1]

My computer is running out of hard drive space. i got another hard drive that is about 1.2 gigs. It is IDE and i think ata 33. Can i just take the older hard drive and put it on the same ide channel as my hard drive that is running out of space. when i start up the computer will it reconize it and appear as a new drive in "my computer".

 

[HalfCrazy]

Originally posted by: thejackal1
My computer is running out of hard drive space. i got another hard drive that is about 1.2 gigs. It is IDE and i think ata 33. Can i just take the older hard drive and put it on the same ide channel as my hard drive that is running out of space. when i start up the computer will it reconize it and appear as a new drive in "my computer".

Yes you can, Just make sure you set the jumper on the hdd to 'slave'.

 

[jkellynewyork]

Why take the old drive out? Just add the new drive as a secondary drive and keep your OS on old harddrive. By adding the second drive the computer should automatically recognize it upon boot up. Just make sure that the jumpers on the old drive are setup for slave.

Oh miss read post- sorry thought you said take out old drive

 

[bendixG15]

Yep, you'll be okay, but you gotta do one more thing.
Make sure your old drive is set up as the master and the new hard drive as the slave.
You do this by setting the jumper at the back of the drive.
To know how to set the jumper, just go to the drives web site
and look up that drive and you can find the settings.
good luck...

 

[thejackal1]

does the second hard have to be parition? or can i just put it in there.

 

[SearchMaster]

Just put it in there. You may want to format it to clean it off. If nothing else, it will get rid of data and programs that must be at least 6 or 7 years old on a 1.2G drive . You should be able to format it after booting into your O/S.

Depending on your O/S, it will probably come up as a D: or E: drive, unless your current HD has multiple partitions or you have multiple optical (CD/DVD) drives. Win2K and XP are pretty good about letting you reassign drive letters on the fly, however, if needed, because if it comes up as D: it may confuse some of your programs that are looking for stuff on the CD that used to be at D:

Good luck. It should be a pretty simple process.