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How do I hook up 2 hard drives?

B

BigfootKevin

Senior member
I asked my friend if he had any USB storage drives I could borrow, so he mentioned I used my old hard drive from my old computer. It's an 80gig Seagate ATA i believe.


My current one is also ATA, 160gig. How does this work? Do I hook up the other Hard drive and just change the settings in BIOS? And when I want to access my old files, I just go to My Computer and it'll be there listed next to my C drive?

Or could someone just give me a simple step by step solution 😛 Thanks in advance.
 
im sure theres tons of tutorials on google but ill give you the gist of it. this is how it works
im guessing you have ide

one has to be master and one slave. no, its not S&M stuff
you set your current one to master with the pins in the back. and you set your extra one to slave. the computer boots everything from the master when booting up such as windows.
when you do this, the slave will show up under another letter, for example, your hard drive now is under C:, your new one could be E: or F: depending on the drives you have such as cd rom. you can change the letter to whatever you want. but as far as accessing, you just go to windows explorer and click on the drive to get your files.
 
oh yea, with some bios, you gonna manual tell it to look for another hard drive, so if your slave hard drive doesnt show up, thats probably the problem.
 
Here is what I would do:

Buy a USB hard drive enclosure. Remove the old drive and put it in the enclosure. Install the new drive, format, and install your OS. Then, you can plug in the old drive to a USB port and copy the old files to the new drive.

When you are done, format the USB drive, and now you have a place to put your backups. You DO make backups, right? Well, if not, now you have no excuse.

You could have two drives on one IDE channel, as others have stated. But I like my idea because a portable hard drive is just soooo incredibly useful. You can pick them up for under $30 if you shop around.
 
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