adding a second internal drive

J

Junglist0682

Member
Morning folks,

This may sound very easy, but I myself have only been reading up on threads and haven't had the chance to get hands on. My emachines drive has lil space left and I have a dell laying around in which I would like to add.

I assume I should just change the settings on the drive to Master and Slave (master being the one that is currently on my emachine) and slave being the second, but once that is done. What is the next step? Going into bios? Checking to see if it appears? Reviewing the boot options?

Thank you
 
First off, check the IDE cable in your emachines to make sure there is a second connector on the cable, if not, then you'll need to get a different cable. You can either use the master/slave settings or the cable select settings. Your master drive will need to go on the end connector while the slave would go on the middle connector.
 
johnb35 said:
First off, check the IDE cable in your emachines to make sure there is a second connector on the cable, if not, then you'll need to get a different cable. You can either use the master/slave settings or the cable select settings. Your master drive will need to go on the end connector while the slave would go on the middle connector.
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Morning John, if I recall correctly the last time I opened up my tower I believe the HDD was connected via Sata (I do believe I recall seeing a IDE connector available which of course was not in use.
 
Ok. Better get more information first. Is the dell drive IDE or SATA? With sata there is no master/slave jumper. You just have to configure what drive to boot to in the bios. If the dell drive is IDE then leave it jumpered as master and attach it to an IDE cable. Just watch though as usually when attaching an IDE hdd the bios will automatically set that as first boot device instead of original drive.
 
Dell drive is IDE. I was thinking the same about the SATA. (thanks for clearing that up)

I don't mean to sound dumb or anything, but since I just would like to use the IDE HDD for storage... should the OS still be on it? Will it not function correctly if I just format the drive in general and plug it in like that via IDE cable?

Thank you
 
No. You don't need an OS on a storage drive, only a boot drive. YOur best bet would be to do a format on it and start out clean.
 
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