add hard drive without formatting

[ajay000222]

I have a 500gb Seagate hard drive I want to add as a second (D) drive but it has around 400 gb worth of stuff on it I need to keep. I don't have access to a external hard drive or anything big enough for all this data. Would I be able to add the drive without formatting it and how would i do this

thanks in advance

 

[andy faith]

if it's a sata drive then you should just be able to plug it in. if it's IDE and your current drive is also IDE then you'll need to make sure that the second one is set to slave and te first is set to master.

 

[ajay000222]

if it's a sata drive then you should just be able to plug it in. if it's IDE and your current drive is also IDE then you'll need to make sure that the second one is set to slave and te first is set to master.

yeah my primary drive is a western digital caviar black 1 TB (well its gone in for warranty replacement for a second time, kinda ridiculous...) and my second drive is a 500gb seagate 7200.10 I believe. Both sata. so I shud just plug i in and assign it a letter and I won't have to format it?

 

[Bodaggit23]

You won't need to assign a drive letter as it's already formatted.

Should just be plug and play, as long as your BIOS doesn't try to
boot from it.

If it did, you'd need to change the BIOS to specify which drive to
boot from.