Help on hard drive...???

[Tweeter]

First time computer builder trying to figure some things out here.

Recently bought the WD800 special ed. hard-drive. Hooked it up, with my 5-year-old 6 gig as slave, and made no partitions. I'm running Win XP Home Ed.

Observations:

When I tried to remove the old 6 gig, the computer wouldn't boot up (boot disk failure, or some such). Also, I can't seem to find the second drive on the "My Computer" screen (i.e. -- it only shows one hard drive, even though there are two in the case).

Now a couple questions:

(1) Is this normal to not be able to remove the older drive now? Am I stuck with this thing in there?

(2) Why can't I find the old drive on the "My Computer" screen? As a slave, is it just lumped in with the new drive to make one big 86 gig drive now?

(3) By slaving the old one to the new one, did I slow the system down by creating a hard-drive "bottleneck" of some sort, perhaps by making the system have to access the old drive as well as the new one, or something?

(4) Given the two drives, how would you hook them up if they were in your system? Or would you just toss the old drive, and if so, how do I do this since the system won't seem to boot when I pull it out?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Ty.

 

[foofoo]

hi,

for 1)

i've noticed that the wd hds are finicky about jumper settings. if the wd is the only device on the cable it needs to be jumpered for cable select, not master for some reason. sinilarly, if it is present with another hd (and it is the master) in needs to be jumpered for master, not cable select.

for 2)
no, they are never lumped together like that (unless you are doing something very unusual in raid, which you arent)

for 3)
this shouldnt be the case, depending on the age of your system. both devices need to be running dma

for 4)
i would just toss the old one, one more thing to break or get flaky and not any real benefit (assuming you already have a backup system). another option would be to slave it on the secondary ide and use it for backups (assuming the 2nd ide isnt full, and you can backup most usefull stuff on 6gb)

hope this helps

 

[Jeff7]

1) Or remove the jumper completely if it's the only device on the cable.
2) What foofoo said.
3) Let the wisdom of foofoo guide you here as well.
4) See #2 above.

If there's important stuff on the 6GB drive, set one drive to master(preferably the bootable drive, if there is one yet), and the other to slave (I generally don't ever use cable select); once it boots, tranfer the data.
If the 6GB drive is empty, or has nothing of value on it, set it aside for now, remove the jumper from the WD800 hard drive, hook it to the primary IDE controller, boot with the WinXP CD in the drive, and do the setup from there. If you still want to use the 6GB as a place for temporary storage on the system, there's a few options here.
If you have 2 devices on the secondary IDE controller: set the WD800 to master, the 6GB to slave, and hook them on the same cable.
If you have only 1 device on the secondary controller: leave the WD800 as is, set the hard drive to master, and the other device (probably a CD-drive) to slave, and plug them both into the secondary IDE controller.
Generally you want to put the fast IDE devices together (like the new WD drive), and the slower devices, like old hard drives or any optical drives, on their own IDE chain.