How do I add another hard disk?

Question

I would like to add another hard disk in my PC. I tried adding it but there seems to be a problem. The PC cannot detect the hard disk. Maybe a conflict between master and slave? How do i know about the master and slave thing?

The new hard disk is 60 gb western digital , caviar.
The old one is 20 gb quantum fireball.

I also have 2 cd roms.
Can you please tell me about the IDE cables and jumpers in hard disk to make both disk work (including cdroms) . Thank you!

Answer 1

with two IDE ports on your motherboard you can drive upto four IDE Devices,,,,

Each cable has master / slave....
Dont worry which plug goes where....

Set one device to master, one to slave.... Per cable...

So two slaves/ Two masters....

Also law was passed.... u have to refer to them as primary and secondary... the word slave is now illegal and offense due to the "slavery" in history.

If it can not detect with this, Make sure in bios you dont have to scan drives b4 they are found

Answer 2

The most likely problem you have is that your second disk is set to the MASTER configuration.

You need to set it to the SLAVE configuration.

If you look at the label on the top of the drive, you should see instructions, and maybe a diagram, to do this. Simply pull out the jumper, and put it back on the designated pins - the jumper is a small plastic thingy about 3 mm wide and 4 mm high.

Windows should automatically see the second drive upon startup.

The CDROMS do not affect the hard drives. They are usually on a seperate EIDE ribbon cable. Your 2 HDDs should be on the same EIDE cable.

Answer 3

I sugest that you place both hard drives on the first connector of each ide cable, the hard drives would have a little diagram that will teach you which pin set will make it the master and which will make it the slave, set the main hardrives as masters, the rest of them as slaves and so on. Placing them in the first connector will ensure top performance for the hardrives. the pc should detect them, you can then format the hardrive to whatever file system you want. I sugest ntfs for windows and extended 3 for linux. good luck

Answer 4

hi
connect both hard disks on primary cable
and connect both cd-roms with secondary cable or vice versa it doesnt matter.
now for the jumper setting read the instructions given on both hard disk u can find jumper settings there. make the 1st drive(the one u want to boot from) Master and other slave and connect them with primary cable.
and do the same with both cdroms and connect it with Secondary Cable. cd-roms has written master/slave where the jumper is placed. its between the data jack and power jack.
i hope it will work

Answer 5

first of all you need 2 IDE port and 2 IDE cable , you can connect your first and second HDD to your IDE port 1 (which is on your mother board but it doesn't make too much diff if you connect them to IDE 2) , then you have to set the jumpers that is small plastic pin next to the IDE port on your HDD itself , you can see the pin and each pin is named , just look at the top of each pin you can see that it written S or Slave , so that picture is your map , you have to set your jumper , set the first HDD which is your old HDD hat your computer was works with it as a Primary and the new one As a Slave , do the same thing for your CD- Rom and your CD-RW. if you r using windows XP it shuld detect it Automatically but in case it doesn't , you need to configure your setup , to do this restart your system and before windows is coming up press DEL or F1 (it depend on your mother board model) then on your Setup you need to set the configuration. if you couldn't ask me again I'll tel you more.

Answer 6

No difficulty. merely plug it in and boot up the laptop. pass to Disk administration and format the stress. There are no dangers to having 2 disks. I even have 6- 250 GB SATA drives in a Raid Array. There are 4 partitions 3 a hundred GB partitions for XP, Vista, and homestead windows 7. something is for storage of non-public documents and backups. The benefit is the greater drives you have in a Raid array the quicker this is and smaller drives additionally run cooler.