Adding second hard drive

[kev7555]

Hello everyone!

I have had a request from a customer to install a second IDE hard drive in an older machine (for extra storage).

Does the second drive need to be on it's own cable or can it be placed on a double cable? How should I set the jumpers on the second drive? Does this drive need to have an operating system installed, or should it simply be a clean format? Can she run a different operating system on the new drive?

Customer is running XP PRO on an older ASUS MB, K-6 500 MHZ processor, 4 Gig IDE drive.

Thank you in advance,

-Kev

[mc2phat]

The new harddrive can be placed on either. The first thing you need to do before you start all this is get the exact model of the motherboard (I'd guess it's a P5A). See what date the BIOS is. Then go to Asus' website and see what size harddrive that board will support. Probably won't support newer large capacity harddrives. You can buy a Promise ATA controller from newegg for about 20 dollars and hook the drive to it. Another option would be to use BIOS overlay software, which is always included with retail drives. I advise against this, BIOS overlay software can be very troublesome.

After you figure out the above, if you get a drive the BIOS will support, you can slave it to the drive that's in there now. Set the jumper on the new drive to "slave." You can also install it on a channel with another device such as CDROM. You'd have to check the jumper setting of the other device. If you go the Promise controller route, jumper the drive to "cable select." You will need an 80 wire IDE cable.

You do not have to put an operating system on the new drive. Just format it. If she's using it for storage that's what you want to do. You *can* put another OS on it if you want...if you decide to do that please search the forums for advice.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

Considering she only has a 4 gig drive, you could clone the 4 gig onto the new one, and then format and slave the 4 gig as extra storage.

[kev7555]

Thanks guys. That answers all of my questions.

Yes, it is a PB5-A ASUS board and she is only adding another small-capacity drive (spare parts from another old machine). So I think I'll just format it and slave it to the existing drive. Just so I'm clear on this, the second drive wants the jumper set for slave regardless of how the jumper is set on the master?

I'm assuming it should be formatted using tools that match the existing OS (ie: Win 98 start-up disk to format for 98 SE).


-Kev

[holocube]

Yes, the jumper on the original drive should be set to master (It may be on cable select at present as it is the only drive on the chain, so check this) and on the new drive, the jumper should be set to slave.

[glc]

With XP, you partition and format it in Disk Management.

[kev7555]

Yes, thanks for the help folks. It all worked out great.


-Kev