Installing a second hard drive - tips
Installing a second hard drive - tips
The C drive (10Gb) of my old Gateway (600Mhz AMD) is near capacity. I bought a 120Gb Seagate internal. I intended to keep the old drive and boot from the new. My first surprise was having to remove and reinstall the old drive so that the interface cable could connect the drives in proper master, slave relationship. My second surprise came when I copied the old to the new with Seagate's disk wizard and found that the computer wouldn't boot (though both drives were properly installed as master and slave). Apparently boot info is in a sector hidden from the wizard. Since my XP CD is an update (not bootable) I had to take out the drives and reverse them. I found the interface cable connectors (very) hard to remove (don't push them fully in until you're sure they're in the right place). The computer still wouldn't boot with the old drive as master, but only when I restored the jumper to the original (NTSF) position.

With the old drive properly attached, I booted and entered the Windows version of the disk wizard. Things began well. The wizard was copying my C drive. Since it's a long process I went upstairs. When I returned the wizard was off and my new drive was unformattted. Tech suggested turning off my screen saver (no help). Tech then suggested turning off power schemes. The wizard still dumped me. Finally tech suggested an alternate jumper configuration reducing apparent disk size. He said that if this didn't work, my computer must be too old for the drive. This time the wizard dumped me immediately! Being clueless I tried again. Again it dumped me, but I noticed that it defaulted to a different format. On the 4th retry it defaulted to NTSF (same as the old drive). Voila! I reached the top of my learning curve with the only damage being a small spot where my shop light melted the rug.