n00b question on adding second hard drive

[SillyClown]

Here are the specs on my new machine:
Mobo - Shuttle AK31A
CPU - AMD XP 1600+
el cheap'o vid card
RAM - 256 Crucial DDR
Drives: Sony DVD drive
(1) old 10Gig Maxtor Drive - jumpers set to master as this will be the "OS" drive
(2) brand new IBM 40Gb 120GXP drive with jumpers set to slave.

A couple quick questions before I take a whack at this. I purchased the hardware from Newegg (except the 10gig drive of course) as well as WinXP Pro. This machine isn't suppose to be a screamer but something that will get my friend through this coming year of college. I've never needed to do a 2 hard drive set up but I am more than positive I can do it. Could someone give me a quick run down of how to pop this sucker in with ease. The 120GXP has 2 jumpers on this drive. That freaked me out at first. So it has settings for 2 different types of setup? I don't know which I should be using. This drive is just OEM so i have no manual with this. I set the drive to be slave with the "16 cylinder setting" i think that's what it said. Is this right? Anyhow, I know how to plug all the hardware in...that's not the problem(aside from the jumper on the IBM drive). My question is what do I need to do on the OS end to recognize the new drive. The BIOS should detect it automatically. But how do I get windows to recognize it is there to use. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

 

[nihil]

As long as your configuration is correct ie: correct jumper settings and the BIOS detects it, windows should do the same. From there you just have to format and partition it as neccessary using whatever utilities you prefer (be it windows or partition magic, etc)

I'm sorry that I can't give you a step by step rundown because it's been a while since i've used windows. You should be okay though, it's not too hard even for a novice. Any other specific questions should be easy for me or other members to answer. Good luck.

 

[Hessakia]

Your best bet is to boot off an 98 boot disk and run FDISK--as Windows XP has a really weird Partitioning program (if you want to try its located in the control panel, under administrative tools, its called computer management--and inside of that is a program called disk manager, and it will do everythign you need.



Hess.

 

[DaiShan]

You will need to use the windows xp tool regardless to set the drive as active, so you may as well use it to partition into ntfs

 

[FluxCapacitor]

Actually, you can change the active partition using fdisk. How do you think we did it in the old days?

Plus, if you'll notice, he's not going to use the drive for the operating system... So it wouldn't make a lot of sense to set it as the active partition.

SillyClown:

If your BIOS detects the drive, WinXP will detect the drive. Of course, it won't be usable until you partition and format it, but it sounds like that shouldn't be a problem for you to do. If you need help finding the disk administrator program in XP just let us know.

About your IBM drive.... whatever "cylinder" setting it was on originally, leave it like that, just change it to slave instead of master.