Second hard-drive

[wildwood]

I've stuck my old HD in the slot under the new HD, connected the slave plug on that ribbon cord (IDE?) and the empty plug on power cord in the slots where they fit. Started the comp up, but nothing out of the ordinary happens. The XP window starts up as normal but doesn't have an extra drive in 'my computer'. Do I need special software or knowledge to gain access to the second HD? I'm sure I've read of others on this site, who use a second HD as a backup storage device, which is/was my intention. The old HD has Windows98 and all my goodies on it, if that makes any difference.

[honkytonkman]

When you add a second HD you need to tell the HD which position it is in the 'chain'... At the moment, it's not telling your operating system where it is. HDs that you buy or when installed in the machine are at 1. You need to designate your's as 2, as it is now the 'slave'. When you look at the end or side of the HD, you will notice a bank of little pins and some of them have small 'Lego' blocks straddling them. These little blocks are called 'jumpers' and basically they short-out the pair of pinsand depending which pair of pins is straddled, it gives off different information. On most drives there is a little sticker with the positions explained on it. If not.. go to the website of company that made the HD and search their techie archive for details on setting the jumper positions. It sounds more complicated than it is. Hope this helps..

[answerbok]

agree with Lordhonkytonkman; have you relocated jumper from Master position to Slave? then xp should recognise it- Oh wait a mo. there's more XP is NTFS, W98 is FAT32 - i tried what your trying it wouldn't accept. I had to fdisk, destroy primary partion and reformat, you lose all your data that way, but at least you get a spare hard drive AND, if you do fdisk, make sure you check option 5 [change hdd no. to 2] or else you will format C: Drive!

[j2buttonsw]

As said, best to have the XP drive as a master and the Windows 98 as a slave. XP, like Windows 2000, will recognise both NTFS and FAT32 so you should not need to re-format it. What I don't understand is that is has booted: usually if you mix up slave/master or have two slaves/masters the mainboard will not recognise either and it won't boot. What does the POST say? Another thing is that the drive needs reactivating: right-click my computer-manage and in disk manager are both hard drives present?

[wildwood]

Hey, thanks everyone. J2, you're right' after I set the 2nd drive to slave (but had not reset the master yet) it wouldn't boot.
Yes, those jumper thingies were causing the trouble. Had the same problem 4 years ago when I added a CD-writer. Forgotten about that;-(
Had quite a bit of trouble setting the master HD though. Only 8 pins, but two jumpers. Nine combination on the label for master/slave/cable options, each for upper/lower/clpi(?). No clues on the Net. Samsung site was useless for support too. Anyway, I took the most likely looking option and it worked straight away.
The default C/drive[NTFS] has XP as was installed, with a 4GB locked partition as D/drive[FAT32], which has the XP recovery in it.
The F/drive[FAT32] is the one with my old HD and I seem to be able to easily transfer folders with piccies or documents between one and the other, despite the difference in file systems. I originally thought when accessing it, the installed OS (windows98) might start up, but no, it opens as a directory and works just like a gigantic floppy drive.
When I am eventually happy with XP, I'll re-format the extra drive and keep all my goodies on it for safety, that'll should be a lot quicker than having to write everything on CDs every month. Thanks again.

[gmc2002]

There is one important point no-one has mentioned, set up your BIOS to "see" the drive.

[wildwood]

Could you elaborate gmc2002? I know how to get into bios, but am reluctant to muck about in there. Is there something that has to be re-set there? Things seem to work fine as it is.

[j2buttonsw]

On the first screen ensure that all IDE devices are set to Auto detect (the default). Unless you disable the IDE devices this is a trivial point. If it ain't broke etc etc

[wildwood]

Has a quick look. The added drive shows up as the Primary IDE Slave drive, so everything OK, I think. thanks again.