Installing a 3rd hard drive

[ahlstedt]

Hi,
I'm trying to install a 3rd Hard drive on my Gateway 500XL. I have two hard drives on my primary IDE Controller and a DVD RAM on the secondary, where I now try to install a Samsung 80GB 7200rpm hard drive.
I first tried to install it as an external, USB drive, but it took over my D:\ drive. Also when I tried to install it as "Master" on my secondary drive with the DVD RAM as "slave" it not only took over my D:\ drive, which is on the primary controller, but it also wiped out my DVD RAM. I am running XL Pro and XL home on the two different drives.
Any assistance "not too technical" please.
Kind regards
Ake

 

[SNGX1275]

What do you mean by taking over? Do you mean it becomes D? I assume thats what you mean. That by itself isn't anything bad, it may just mean it pushed your other drives back a letter or 2. Check to make sure that is the case. If so, thats a simple enough fix. In your Disk Management from Administrative Tools control panel you can change the drive letter names.

 

[Samstoned]

I would make it slave on 2nd ide cable

happy snow days if you get them

 

[werty316]

But if you run it off of the 2nd IDE (master would be a CDROM so this HD would be the slave) won't it run at ATA66? Not a big issue I guess. make sure the jumpoer is switched to "slave".

 

[ahlstedt]

Werty 316

The problem is that even if I get all the drive appearing in BIOS, "My computer" only shows tw drives, i.e. C and D. The other two disappeares.
What is ATA66?
Thanks
Ake

 

[werty316]

ATA is a rated tranfer mode for IDE devices. Most IDE HDs are rated at ATA100 but Maxtor HDs are rated at ATA133. SATA1 is 150 and SATA2 is 300. CDROMs are ATA33 I think. This means that if you connect a HD to the secondary channel (ie second IDE cable) the HD will run at ATA33 most due to the fact that HDs usually use a 80pin cable where as CDROMs use a 40pin cable I think. But if you are using it for backing stuff up and just a place to store files then you shouldn't worry about it. If you look at the cable that your HDs are connected to you will noticed there are more bumps hence its a 80pin cable while the CDROM cable has less bumps.

Heres a forum I found in google. It explains it more there.
http://www.mvktech.net/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,34/func,view/catid,32/id,3852/

here is a very through article on IDE/ATA.
http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_IDE.html