CRAIGFIN

I have a spare 40G hard drive and want to link it to my current 80G HDD. How do you do this? Can I just link it on the Primary IDE as a slave unit? How do you prepare the HDD, do I need to install XP onto the spare HDD or do I format it?

As you can tell I haven't done this before so any advice is appreciated.

Cheers,

Craig.

Nick

Connect the spare drive to a spare IDE connection. If you are connecting to the slave IDE connection, ensure that you set the pins on the back of the drive to represent "slave", otherwise set it to "master". You do not need to install XP, but you will need to partition & format the drive.

Give us some more info about what spare IDE cables you have in your case & we can help you more on the first step of getting the drive connected.

CRAIGFIN

Nick,

Thanks for the reply. I currently have my 80G HDD set as a Master on IDE 1, my DVD RW Drive is set as Master on IDE 2. I'm guessing that the second HDD should be set as Slave on IDE 1. I really need to know how to prepare the HDD. I just want to use it as a storage medium.

Do I prepare it in Windows or does it have to be done during bootup / BIOS?

Cheers,

Craig.

Nick

Hi Craig

After you've connected the drive, go into the BIOS at boot up (pressing DEL or F2 usually works) & in one of the first screens you should see that 2 drives are recognised, if so then that's fine & you can exit & boot to Windows. Then go to Control Panel, Classic View, Administrative tools, Computer management. Open the storage container on the left & click on Disk Management. On the right you should see your 2 drives & the CD. (After formatting the new drive, you can also use this screen to change drive letters, for instance make your hard drives c: & d: & your CD drive e:). Right clicking the new drive will allow you to partition & format it.