installing a 2nd hard drive

[jeffbwfc]

i have a old 40g hard drive with windows Me installed, i want to know can i remove Me form the hd (as this was the reason i upgraded to xp plus a new Hd) then use it as a 2nd hd to store music files etc, will it need to have the OS installed or will Xp on my master hd find my old hd itself ?? its all new to me so any help would be great,

[lard]

I'd install the old HDD on your secondary IDE channel, boot up and then format the old disk as NTFS to wipe everything off of it. Right-click on 'My Computer' go to 'manage' then 'disk management' to perform the formatting.

[anthomson]

If you have two devices on a single IDE channel you will have to set one up as the primary device and one as the secondary device so they do not clash. As you will probably be sharing the IDE cable with a CD or DVD drive you will probably be the case and you will have to change one of the devices using the links on the back of the drive. They are almost always labeled on or near the links so you should be able to figure out which one to change.

[stevie21]

No new info here, but I thought some details should be clarified. As mentioned already, if you look inside your PC there's a strip of wires which plug into your existing CD/hard drive. There should be a another connection halfway along it labelled "slave". Plug this into your 2nd HD, manually set this HD as slave by amending the "jumpers" on the back (as anthomson says) and you will NOT need any operating system on the 2nd HD. Then follow lard's instructions on disk management (also in control panel under "administrative tools"). Actually, you may want to put/leave an operating system on this 2nd HD just in case the main one fails altogether, then you can reverse their roles, use the new one as slave and retrieve files from it in any future emergency.