Hello all,

First off I confess to being a complete newbie - have used pc's for years, no problems installing PCIs etc....but I recently purchased a new hard drive, which arrived today. I had hoped to use it as a second drive, but whenever I connected it the PC would never porogress beyond the startup page )the page that does a memory check, press del to enter setup, esc to slip memory test etc). so I soon abandoned the second hard drive idea.

Now i want to use the new drive as my only hard drive - i'm not really bothered about copying any of the files from what will be muy old hasrd drive - except xp, which I have a copy of. Can someone please please tell me how I can get my copy of XP onto what I assume is a totally black new hard drive? This has been driving me crazy, I really need this new hard drive - my old one is 20gb, so you can imagine i'm keen to dispose of it, perhaps place it in a museum or something

Can someone please help me out? This seems a friendly community and I will be eternally grateful to anyone who can figure this out for me!!!

Thanks for reading

John, Edinburgh, Scotland

Well, to get your drive working without reformatting, is to set the "Jumpers". If you look at the drive, you should see a small plastic clip on a set of pins. This piece of plastic tells the drive to be either "Master", "Slave", or "Cable Select". I am assuming that the drive you have in there currently is set to "Master". IF you set the jumper on the new drive to "Slave", it will go past your boot order and work fine. There is a diagram on the Hard Drives Information sticker. Good luck.

thanks for that, I'll try it as soon as i get home from work tonight