Add a Second Hard Drive - Comments Page 3

I see several people have the same problem I do, but I don't see an answer. I just built a new PC. The primary HD is new. I added my Maxtor (which I had as a second HD in my old system). The BIOS sees it, Device Manager sees it, but Windows Explorer does not. Nothing changed on the HD from the old system (that recognized it) to the new. Also, the new HD is 250 GB but Windows Explorer only shows 125 GB.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Try setting the jumpers on the second drive to Slave or Cable Select. Also make sure it's on the second connector on the IDE cable, or that it's plugged into the IDE2 slot. As for the Windows not showing the full size of your 250GB drive, it may be you have an older hard drive controller. Some support only 128GB max.

Ok, I'm a relative rookie at this hardware stuff, so be kind. I'm venturing into the unknown realm of adding a second 15GB HD to my existing 3GB. (which until 3 months ago was measured in mere MBs!) I've finally entered the new millenium! Anyway,I gather you're talking about adding it to the existing HD IDE. But, the net-tech guy at work was explaining how I should attach it to my C Drive IDE (feel free to correct my terminlogy!)

And allow me to see if I follow his reasoning: Primarily it's a CYA for a system crash. If it's connected as one big hard drive, crashing would make me lose absolutely everything. His way, I'd lose the OS on my master HD, but keep whatever was in my slave HD. (physical vs virtual?)

I'm not going to attempt this on my own -- I have a friend that is fairly knowledgable I'm going to rely on, but I want to follow what he's doing since this could majorly affect my system. And besides, I just want to learn . . .

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can't attach a new hard drive to an existing one. Adding a new drive will ALWAYS mean adding a new drive letter (D, E, etc.)

I recently upgraded computers and am now venturing into the world of SATA drives (used to only work with IDEs). Here's the deal though. My motherboard currently has 6 spots for SATA drive connections. However, I'd like to be running upwards of 8 SATA hard drives. Is there ANY way to do this?? Perhaps via a SATA Y-split cable or another way? Or am I limited to just those 6?

EDITOR'S NOTE: There are SATA port multipliers available. I'm not sure how far you can go, but that sounds doable.

I can install 4 sata's and 2 ide's and a external, but thats nuts. I'll be happy to get to a terabyte. Learning as fast as I can, JIM RICHARDS

I'm trying to upgrade an aging-but-pretty-capable IBM Laptop (Thinkpad T22) by replacing its original 20GB HDD with a 60GB one. I've got a PCMCIA card that gives me USB2 ports (the built-in USB port is 1.1), and an external 2.5" USB HDD box. And I want to clone my 20GB HDD (1 big partition) onto a 30GB partition at the front of the new drive.

So far, I've struck out with BootitNG and DiskCopy for DOS and Norton Ghost 2003 -- different problems with each. Trinity Rescue Kit (Linux) might work, but I'm not nearly Linux geek enough to use it. Do you have comparable instructions anywhere for us laptop folks who DON'T have room for two internal HDDs?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Acronis can do a full backup "image" to the external drive that can be restored to another disk. I recommend it.

Hi I recently purchased a new 2.5" notebook HD and am using it with an external USB case for extra memory. However, I didn't realise that I had to format the HD first, and I can't seem to do that through the USB - says something that the drivers were installed, but it can't start up, or something like that. I opened my pc, but my IDE cables are too big for it, and it is definitely not a SATA HD. How do I go about formatting this without a laptop?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You should be able to format a USB-connected drive. Can you give a more specific error message?

I have an HDD that I pulled from a different computer and currently have connected via USB in an external case. The drive has a 4Gb partition in Fat32 and a 220Gb partition in NTFS both are healthy, the second drive states Healthy (Active) but no drive letter is assigned so I cannot access it in My Computer. If I right click on the bar in Disk Management, the only options i can access are Help and Properties. What can I do to assign a drive letter?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You may need to change the jumpers from MASTER to SLAVE or CABLE SELECT.

First of all, I'd like to thank you for your helpful page, and for replying to a lot of questions that have been asked. Now for my question. I know my computer supports SATA hard drives, as my current hard drive is SATA. I am going to install an identical hard drive to my current one. But is it a possibility that my computer cannot support more than one drive?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You'll have to check the motherboard to see if there is another SATA connector. Usually there are two or four, so chances ore good.

Nice article! I put a new SATA drive in my pc and installed xp. I put an older SATA drive as the secondary drive. However I am getting stop errors whenever I have the second drive connected. It won't let me get into XP. It pretty much tells me there is a driver corrupted in the XP that is installed on the second drive from my old pc.(was getting stop errors - unable to boot into XP on that as well).

Is there anyway to not boot the second hard drive, load XP on the first HD and then from there format that 2nd drive so I can start fresh?

Nice article.... and good advice... I have a data recovery problem... I had a Motherboard blow, but hard drives (SATA Raid stripe array) with pics movies that I need.

Hooked them to a slightly older machine with Belkin PCI Serial ATA card (F5U198) and can see it as "uninitialized" and "unallocated" with the total GBit storage correct and Raid 0 set up in properties... but I still cannot assign a drive letter to it... Any ideas? Thanks in advance!