Adding a second internal hard drive...problems?

Question

I'm adding another hard drive from another computer hoping to retrieve some pictures.

Current comp HP with 40gb HD

trying to add the second hard drive but every time I plug it into the slave part of the cable and put power to it, my comp freezes! Do I have to buy something to add a second HD??? Please help

Answer 1

Set the jumpers the boot hd to master, and the jumper on the slave hd to slave. Reset the bios so the slave system is not being booted to. Right now you system is having a nervous breakdown trying to boot to two master hd's.

Answer 2

Hi, It could be a problem with Windows not assigning a drive letter for the drive. Try this: 1) Right Click 'my computer' 2) Select 'Manage' 3) Select 'Disk Management' 4) Right Click on specific harddrive 5) Select "Change Drive letters and paths" 6) Select a other drive letter which isn't listed in 'my computer' 7) I usually choose something like 'X', 'Y' or 'Z' just to make sure. Hope this helps. If not, check if the harddrive shows "healthy' which means the partition is OK. If not try formatting the drive by right clicking the drive and pressing 'format'. Use NTFS file system with default size.

Answer 3

No, but everything has to be set correctly. If you are adding it in place of your cd drive, then you shouldn't have to do anything. But if you are adding it ot the same cable as your other hard drive, you have to change the jumper settings on both drives...one must be set to master (the original) and the other set to slave. Then you may have to go into the BIOS and tell it to look for a slave device since it may be disabled. Just set it to 'Auto' and it should detect it. Then you should boot up fine.

Answer 4

Hi. One drive needs to have it's jumper set to MA and the other to SL. These are on the back.