How do i transfer 1 hard drive to computer to act as a master drive?

Question

I have 2 computers, one of the computer's harddrive's is done. I wnted to take the hard drive from the lesser of the 2 computers and put it into the more "juiced" one, but it wont recognize it. What do i do? The only reason why i was able to buy a new computer was with the promise to stick my wife's computer into my old system. Now i am looking for a solution

Answer 1

You have to plug the ribbon cable into the right hard drive. There is a connector for the master and a connector for the slave. So make sure the drive jumpers are set correctly as well as the ribbon cable selection.

You may have to go into the setup and identify 2 hard drives also depending on your system.

Answer 2

There is a couple of things you can try:

1) Use an IDE cable with two connections, be sure to put the one to boot from, closest to the motherboard. And change the jumper settings, on the two hard drives, to 'Cable Select'

and/or

2) Use you Windows installation disk, to run the 'Recovery Console' program and use the 'Fixboot' utility to make a new Master Boot Record.

You could also use the 'Bootcfg' utility, if you want to be able to have a multi-boot system.

Answer 3

There are usually jumpers that need to be configured on both the master and slave drives: if the jumper specs aren't on a label on the hard drive, consult the manufacturer's website.