How can I use two different hard drives, one was factory installed the other I installed myself.?

Question

The boot section of the original hard drive failed, but I was told that it would still work. I bought and installed a new hard drive, but I still want to be able to use the space on the old hard drive. How can I hook the two up together. My computer has the space for two hard drives too, how do you make them both work?

Answer 1

I assume your original one no longer boots the computer?

Sounds like you're going to have to reformat the original drive so the following assumes this.

Make sure that the new drive is the master and the old drive is the slave. This is done by properly setting the jumpers on the drive next to the power connector. Refer to the drive manual (or many times printed on the drive itself) for information.

Boot from a bootable floppy and run Fdisk to create partitions on the new drive. Make sure to set this drive as "active." (Active means that it becomes the boot drive.) Also then remove and recreate partitions on the old drive. If you have a WinXP/2000 CD, you can also boot from that to run the setup.

Start installing the O/S and follow the prompts. If both drives aren't available after windows is installed, go to the utilities and format the missing drive.