Can I add old HD from previous PC to new PC as secondary?

[Woodie]

My wife's eMachines C2480 MB went out (and took the KB with it). Cost of repair was enough to convince us to replace her machine. Anyway, my question is, Can we take her old HD (Western Digital WD800) and add as a secondary drive on her new machine? New machine is a eMachines T3418 and has 160GB SATA drive.

If so, would I use the jumpers to designate master/slave config or us the position on the cable to determine master/slave?

BTW, I know eMachines are 'cheap' and not really the screamers gamers and hard core PC users want, but we have had very good luck with ours. This is the first problem we have had with an eMachines PC and have gone thru several over the past 8-9 years, pushing to old ones down to grandkids, etc.

thx, Woodie

 

[bushwhacker]

um, if you prefer, you can put your western digital as master and boot along with everything you had or put it in slave.

if you using sata, it dont need any master/slave config, but for Western Digital, yes. If you prefer to boot from new drive, put the Sata in first booting order from bios.

 

[CrossFire851]

You can take the drive out, but make sure you don't boot to it because when it gets to the windows screen it will just turn off due to driver conflict.

So make sure you boot to the right hard drive

 

[Samstoned]

do not make the ide drive master
put on 2nd ide channel set to slave
this will be the middle cable conneter
you may need to swap cables out as the machine default cable for 2nd ide is usually 1 connetion to cd or dvd
Sata systems are funny when adding a ide drive
I know in most cases it doesn't work ,but try to talk to emachine tech as to the correct bios config for booting from sata with the other ide disc as slave

 

[Woodie]

um, if you prefer, you can put your western digital as master and boot along with everything you had or put it in slave.

if you using sata, it dont need any master/slave config, but for Western Digital, yes. If you prefer to boot from new drive, put the Sata in first booting order from bios.

Thanks for the hints, I added the second drive on the slave cable plug and it worked fine. However, it would not boot off just the old drive as suggested above. That's too bad, it would have saved a lot of transfer grief, however, the old drive (WD800) runs fine as secondary and the primary SATA drive (WD1600) seems happy with it.

thanks, Woodie