Installing a Second HD

[jason120au]

What I want to do is buy another 40gig Seagate 7200rpm IDE/ATA hard drive.
What I am asking is, what is the easiest way to reformat my original 60gig hard drive without losing any data from that hard drive.
What I was thinking of doing, is to set the 60gig as a slave so that all the data is allready on it, and partitioning the 40gig and reinstalling WinXP Pro, is this the best way to do it, or is there another easier way?
The above way will save me moving all the data from the 60gig to the 40gig.

 

[notnamed]

Okay, is this what you want to do?
1. Slave the big drive
2. Partition the small drive
3. Reinstall Windows on the small drive
4. Leave all your data on the big drive
?
Yes, and you wouldn't have to touch the stuff on the big drive at all, just slave it by switching the jumpers next to the IDE cable port on the back of the drive (there should be a diagram next to it or in the manual of the new hard drive, most jumpers [except the really old ones] go to the same pattern)
Then make sure that the big drive is set to slave, the small one set to master, boot 'er up with the WinXP disk in and it should go fine. Make sure however that the BIOS recognises the small drive as slave...it'll show up on your POST.

 

[jason120au]

I opened my case yesterday, and cleaned a ton of dust out of the processor fan.
I found that when I looked at the drive just below the IDE cable there was a series of mental pins, on one of these metal pins was a plastic cover covering 1 set of 2 pins, is that the jumpers that you were talking about?

 

[Dean]

10-4

What type of HDD is it?

 

[notnamed]

No, the jumpers (sorry I didn't clarify) are on the back of the HD itself. it's a series of metal pins with usually 2 of them contected together with a plastic thing (easily removed with a flat-head screwdriver).

 

[jason120au]

Its a Maxtor 60gig 7200rpm

 

[venomx]

Will a Maxtor and Seagate work together??

 

[Daniel]

Yes.

 

[venomx]

wow I didnt know that... I couldnt get a Maxtor and a Western Digital to work together... was told they had to be the same...

 

[Bruce]

Well you were misinformed... and perhaps a bit unlucky as well.

Any two (or even three or four if your so inclined) will work fine together. You just need to realize that the jumpers can be arranged differently for different brands. The only time they would need to be the same, however, is if you plan on running them in a RAID configuration.

 

[Rick]

I have had trouble mixing certain HD's in the past... I can't recall for certain, but I believe it was a 6 gig Maxtor and a 1.5 gig Seagate (this WAS a long time ago).
The Maxtor refused to function at all as a slave to the Seagate. I had to set the Maxtor as a master, and the Seagate as the slave before it would operate.
Other than that one instance, I've used various configurations of Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, and Western Digital drives without any problems.
One caveat though... It's best not to mix ATA modes on a single IDE channel.
If your new drive it an ATA 133 and the older one is an ATA 100, try to keep them on seperate IDE channels. Unfortunately though, that's not usually feasable because you more than likely also have IDE/ATAPI CD drives in the same system. So unless you add another controller, you'll have to mix them.