Hi, a friend of mine gave me three 80 gig Western Digital 7200 RPM hard drives that he pulled from his old computer. I want to add these to my computer and use them strictly for storing my music library onto leaving my 150 gig WD hard drive I have now for progams and games. These hard drives are the older Serial ATA drives, now I have 3 of the Serial ATA to Ultra ATA bridge boards for the hard drives. Can someone give me step by step instructions on what i need to do in order to add all 3 of these to my computer? I have plenty of storage space in my Tower and I have an ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard with a 700 watt power supply. The hard drives do have information on them and I need to somehow format all the drives as well. Im running Windows XP O.S. right now. I thought when I just plug in a 2nd drive (I tried to add one to see if it would work) with the jumper set on "Slave" for the second drive, that windows XP would automatically reconize the 2nd drive and prompt me to set it up. I couldn't even boot up into windows when I tried this, it got to the windows loading screen, and showed it loading for about 10 minutes before I decided to abort and pull the drive back out. Any help or advice for this noob would be greatly appreciated. I just want to add the 3 hard drives to use for music storage, not to do a RAID or backup function of another drive. Thanks for all your help.
Adding 3 used hard drives to a new computer..
- Thread starter Hellion
- Start date
When you added the 2nd drive and set it to slave, did you set your original drive to master? If not, then that is your problem.
Hard drive with your OS on it = master
2nd drive = slave.
Thats based on you putting them both on the same cable.
Now for the other 2.
If you have an open ide port on your motherboard (some people do not since thats where they put there cd/dvd drives) then connect the other 2 drives up to the cable, making 1 of them a master and the other a slave.
Most of the newer motherboards do not even have 2 separate IDE ports on the motherboard.
On any of the drives you want to reformat, 1 way you can do it is once you are booted into windows, go to my computer and right click on the drive you want to reformat, then select reformat and follow the directions.
Another is to reformat them using the Fdisk command. You can do this by first making a boot disk onto a floppy and then rebooting with the disk in your drive, once you get to a A:\ prompt in dos, just type fdisk and follow the directions. Just make sure you do not select the drive with your OS on it, or you will be screwed.
You could also download Western Digitals software for configuring hard drives. That also goes on to a floppy or a CD, depending on which version you download,and then you reboot. There is also a version that you can run right from windows.
Go to the link below and download the lifeguard tools software from Western digital.
http://support.wdc.com/download/?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=53
Hard drive with your OS on it = master
2nd drive = slave.
Thats based on you putting them both on the same cable.
Now for the other 2.
If you have an open ide port on your motherboard (some people do not since thats where they put there cd/dvd drives) then connect the other 2 drives up to the cable, making 1 of them a master and the other a slave.
Most of the newer motherboards do not even have 2 separate IDE ports on the motherboard.
On any of the drives you want to reformat, 1 way you can do it is once you are booted into windows, go to my computer and right click on the drive you want to reformat, then select reformat and follow the directions.
Another is to reformat them using the Fdisk command. You can do this by first making a boot disk onto a floppy and then rebooting with the disk in your drive, once you get to a A:\ prompt in dos, just type fdisk and follow the directions. Just make sure you do not select the drive with your OS on it, or you will be screwed.
You could also download Western Digitals software for configuring hard drives. That also goes on to a floppy or a CD, depending on which version you download,and then you reboot. There is also a version that you can run right from windows.
Go to the link below and download the lifeguard tools software from Western digital.
http://support.wdc.com/download/?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=53
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Serial ATA adaptor
They have the large connectors in the back. The converter kit thing that I have plugs into that and turns them into the smaller ones. There is a red cable that comes out of the adaptor that plugs directly into the mother board. I have 4 serial ata slots in the motherboard for these (1 is being used already for my main hard drive that came with the computer. Here is a link of the adaptor thingy I have...
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...2&Sku=C250-2136&SRCCODE=PWATCH&CMP=OTC-PWATCH
Hope this helps. Thanks for any more info you can give.
They have the large connectors in the back. The converter kit thing that I have plugs into that and turns them into the smaller ones. There is a red cable that comes out of the adaptor that plugs directly into the mother board. I have 4 serial ata slots in the motherboard for these (1 is being used already for my main hard drive that came with the computer. Here is a link of the adaptor thingy I have...
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...2&Sku=C250-2136&SRCCODE=PWATCH&CMP=OTC-PWATCH
Hope this helps. Thanks for any more info you can give.