mattstant

Just got a good deal on a Seagate Barracuda 80 gig drive for 80 quid but the thing is i have never done a hard drive before
I've installed loads of cd drives modems and grapics cards but never I've never done a hard drive.
I intend to use as storage for edited home videos (No not the kind youre thinking of)so it will be a slave drive initially.

but thinking again i may want to make it the master as it is a larger more reliable drive than my current one .
Am i right in thinking it is just a case of copying the contents of my bootable drive over then swapping the jumpers over and reconfiguring it through the bios as the first bootable drive ????


Apologies if this is a bit of a how long is a piece of string questions but any advice or web site recomendations would be much appreciated

suba

if you know the concept of IDE, then you can fit 4 IDE device in most motherboard. they are primary master (usually your c: drive), primary slave (usually your d: drive), secondary master and slave.

each IDE cable can carry the 1 master and 1 slave. so in your example, the easiest way to connect up a new HDD is to get another IDE cable and connect it up to the secondary master (assuming your primary master and slave are used for HDD and CDROM).

as for copying the OS (and the entire HDD) across to the new HDD, you will need software like Ghost or DriveImage. alternatively, install your new HDD as c: and re-install the OS again.

Attu

As soon as Bios locates it and as long as youve set the jumpers to master and the other to slave it will then be your first bootable drive, you wont need to actualy change anything in bios just auto detect the drive.
What are you using to coppy the old files over with ?? I use Norton Ghost usually but if your brave you can do it from Dos.

Andy

Attu

I need to learn to type faster

towzer

you're kind of right, but you'll need to make sure the slave has the SYS files on the boot sector otherwise you won't get as far as the OS. In the old days you would Xcopy the drive contents and then boot from a system disk and enter SYS C: At which point the slave drive has the boot sector written and the OS can be made bootable - providing you move the jumpers around etc.

From your description, it sounds like your existing drive is smaller than the 80GB device? If I were you I would keep your current drive as the main device but only use it for the OS and maybe some applications, then store all your data on the second drive. The main reason is that it's much easier to re-build a second drive if it doesn't have your data on it. Consequently you can install apps or service packs (and if it screws up your system or you want to do a clean install rather than applying patch over patch) knowing your data is safe. Also, if you get a new PC you simply take your data drive accross.

Phil

mattstant

thanks for the replies.
yes towzer the old drive is 20 gig and i also have an 8 gig secondary drive i think youre way may be preferable as i have had the nightmare already of trying to recover files from a drive with bad sectors on

Cheers matt