External Harddrive

D

dark_legacy2006

New Member
ok so i have a 120gb Magnetic Data Technologies, with a 2mb buffer, its 7200rpm and its and ATA 100 (whatever that means) anyways it use to work great and i know i didnt damage it in anyway cause i didnt drop ot or do anything.... this exact thing has happened to another external harddrive.. te weird thing is it still powers up about 10% of the time. so i took it out of its external case and i was thinking id run it as a slave drive to see if it would work. I just need some help
1. the drive already had data on it (movies) im not worried about keeping it but can i just hook it up like a slave?
2. i set the standard settings to slave where do i go from there?
- do i just give it power fro any extra power cable and hook it up under ide1 or ide2?
3. most computers only have 2 ide slots so if i do this will i not have a CD Rom
4. when i hook it up and i check out my computer specs will it sjust read 120gb plus what i ahd before?

sorry for all the questions....
help would be appreciated
thanks
 
Let's see if we can straighten this out.

You computer likely has two IDE channels, IDE1 (primary) and IDE2 (secondary) or IDE0 and IDE1, depending on mfr. Each channel can handle two devices-- one master and one slave.

A typical setup has one hard drive as master on the primary channel and an optical (CDROM, DVDROM, etc) either as a slave on the primary channel or master on the secondary. IDE drives are connectoed to the motherboard via a ribbon cable of either 40 wires or 80 wires (called UDMA), most cables have three connectors on them, but single-drive cables (only two connectors) are available and out there.

Once you pull the external drive out of its housing (and assuming it's an IDE drive), you can plug it in as a slave on the primary channel with the master hard drive, as a slave on the secondary channel with the master optical, or as a master on the secondary channel and the optical as slave on either channel.

If you have single-drive ribbon cables, you can get a replacement at most electronics vendors or at a computer store. Go with UDMA cables for the hard drives, this allows for faster data throughput.
 
ok ya the ribbon cables have 3 connectors 1 to the IDE, 1 to the main harddrive, and now 1 to the second harddrive. so im going to try and use this for now. so wil the computer auto recognize it?
 
I'm pretty sure the hd should be recognized. I had a 40 gb hd, which I was flip flopping back and forth from an external closer to an internal component. The only thing you might need to do is switch the pin setting if it is not recognized.
 
Trizoy said:
Damaged?
Click to expand...
It could be damaged, but there is also a good possibility that the hd just needs to be reformatted. I had a drive, which was working about 70 percent of the time and then one day it just stopped working. I reformatted the drive and it seems to be working correctly.
 
Sacrinyellow5 said:
It could be damaged, but there is also a good possibility that the hd just needs to be reformatted. I had a drive, which was working about 70 percent of the time and then one day it just stopped working. I reformatted the drive and it seems to be working correctly.
Click to expand...


Western Digital? ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top