Adding an old Pc's HD to my new PC, Questions :)

[CatastrophE]

Hey everyone

Well here's my question I have an old PC with a 40 gig HD in it
that had a load of stuff in stored on it and unfortunatly my old Pc's PSU
seem's to have bit the dust.
I'm thinking of putting it in my new Pc along with the 80 Gig one already inside
but my questions are If i add it as a slave will it want me to Format and Partition it?
or will it just "work" and also some shop I know (which is actually a pretty crap shop) said it
wasnt compatible with my New Pc (Which I find hard to beleive) so is there any risk of me tottaling my
Pc? or should I just ram it in and see if it works?.

All help appreciated

Matty.

Specs - AMD Athlon 3000XP
768 DDR 333
6600GT 128
PSU - 420 Watt

 

[Nodsu]

It should be compatible with your new PC unless you have a SATA only system or the old drive is some ancient SCSI or MFM disk.

If the drive is already partitioned for a DOS/Windows PC system then it will not want you to do it again.

I suggest putting the old drive on its own IDE cable or share the cable with the CDROM.

 

[CatastrophE]

Well my CD and DVD rom take up 2 cable's so the only one I have left is a shared cable with my currant HD would it be safe to connect it to this?.

Matty :angel:

Edit - my Drive is WD400 Advanced IDE drive and i'm not sure how to find out about the "SATA Only"

Matty.

 

[CatastrophE]

Ok decided to put the drive in and got a few more problems now.
I'm out of spare 4 pin power cables
So looking in my burnt out PC i was happy to find a splitter cable to turn one cable into 2.

Ok now my next question is my 400W power supply already has a CD drive DVD drive a HD,Floppy and a 6600GT connected to it and I couldent help but feel the fact I was out of cables was a warning.
So is it safe to use the Splitter cable on the 4 pin connector connected to My currant HD and then connect that to the older HD?
Or does doing this risk my burning out the whole thing?

Basically will connecting an extra 4 pin power cable to my 400W PSU for the HD i want to connect burn out the system or am I just being silly?.


Thanks guys help appreicated.

Matty.

P.S) If your wondering why I'm so questioning of thing's it's because this is my only PC and unlike most of my friends Parents (who know about Pc's and how to fix them and basically do everything for their son's PC needs) I have no one close by who i can call up to help if something goes wrong.
Roughly speaking if something goes wrong for them they always have a spare PC or someone who can fix theirs and i'm left b0rked.

 

[Samstoned]

I have over loaded a pc PSU a few times
on 1 unit a got post beep warning ,but it booted up just fine (250W)
had 5 fans connected 3 HDD's (IDE) and a CDRW plus a line for video card
on another machine it tried to post and shut off I tried to fire it up again and lost the PSU (200W)
I don't know about Sata or IDE's but my scsi's allow for delayed boot this helps remove some of the load to PSU
Good Luck
PS
if you are using XP or W2K and if the system does boot up watch out for chkdsk. on boot don't let it run mess's up the boot ini files(if there is another OS on the new disk) if you get message found new device thats OK