Installing a second hard drive.

IF06 · 07-08-2007, 02:01 PM

Period. I looked around the forum and couldn't find much, then again I suck at searching for information.

Can someone direct me to a link that shows, in full detail, how to install a secondary drive? I know there's a few methods of doing so, so I'd like to know, pretty much, all the options to see which fits my preference. If you can't, instructions would be nice.

I know this question has been presented numerous times but I didn't find those articles helpful.

Camshaft · 07-08-2007, 02:43 PM

you turn off the pc and unplug it then place the drive in a open bay
if the drive has a jumper set it on slave
connect the drive to the board(SATA or IDE depending on what drive you have)
connect power to the drive
boot up
if it doesnt want to boot into windows check in your bios under boot priority

Brinson · 07-08-2007, 02:50 PM

Pretty easy. Just three steps.

1. Set Jumpers- Your old HD may need to be set to Master with Slave or such, then set the new HD jumper to slave.
2. Put it in the case.
3. Hook up the 2 cables. Power and Connection. Connection can be either IDE (long and gray) or Sata (small, usually red from what I've seen).

IF06 · 07-08-2007, 06:25 PM

I heard you could set it up in a way that it acts as one huge hard drive for a more efficient way to access information but the downside is that if I reformat, if I have to, I'd lose all information on both hard drives.

I'm salvaging the second hard drive from my friend's computer, is there a way for me to completely erase the second hard drive before the drives take into affect?

And that brings up the question, when, the next time, I want to return my computer back to factory settings, how will the second hard drive be treated? Would the reformatting just erase the information on the second drive or would it be completely ignored?

Brinson · 07-08-2007, 06:59 PM

You can RAID them so they act 1 HD. But the HDs need to be identical for that to work.

Many different kinds of raids, too.

When you reformat, you choose the HD you want to format and install on.

Next time you reformat, just move all your important stuff to one HD, then instlal on the other. Reformat without data loss.

IF06 · 07-09-2007, 09:43 AM

Oh, that's convenient. So how can I install the second drive without the data from it, that's already there, affecting my computer? My friend gave away his computer, a pretty good one, because it had a lot of viruses. I don't want to go through the trouble of cleaning his drive up so how can I just erase the drive prior to my computer accessing it?

I think I came across a bootup software that does wipe the drive, but I'm kind of cautious that I might accidentally wipe the primary drive that has the OS/ etc partition.

Brinson · 07-09-2007, 12:25 PM

I wouldn't worry about it. Just boot it and format quickly. If its not booting off that hd the virsus shouldn't do anything.

IF06 · 07-10-2007, 08:22 AM

Awesome, thank you. 400gb's now.

IF06 · 07-10-2007, 10:31 PM

Question, I installed the secondary drive. But now I have a question about the partitions. What can I do to get rid of the recovery partition? And I had this menu where it asked something, forgot what, it had the choices of 512, 1024, 4096; something like that. There was also called Default. So I chose that, that was fine, right?

Brinson · 07-11-2007, 01:17 AM

Maybe your swap partition?

There are huge debates about the size it needs to be. Some say over 512mb is overkill, some say twice your ram...some say three times...who knows what's right. Very intelligent people disagree.

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