Hard drive fix up

[Kurtee]

lets say i have an 80gig hd and i wanna put in 1 or 2 more what should i do and how.........do i hae to get similar manafacturer.....and plese tell me the ide configurations pls.........thanks a thousand times

 

[JMMD]

Motherboards usually have 2 IDE ATA channels. There may be more than 2 SATA ports.

You can add another drive but simply adding it to the cable that the current hard drive is on and setting the master slave or cable select jumper correctly.
You can also add it to the secondary channel if that's free.
The new hard drive would be the slave if you're just adding it for additional storage.

 

[Samstoned]

look at the existing drive
make note the jumber on back
assume it's ide we are working with
check the cdrom or dvd drive cable is it the same as the first one
80 wire 40 pin
now on first drive set to master at end of cable
2nd drive in middle set to slave
the cable with the cdrom will need changed if not 80 wire and most oem's use a single connector so you may need to get a new 2 connector
make the cdrom the master and the hdd the slave
now the rest is in formatting the drives and assign letters
with windows 2000 I had to make sure the cd or dvd was the last letter a bug with some software
xp does not need this done a least not xp pro spk 2
if you are adding ide's to sata drive boot config
this gets harder as you will need to keep the sata's as the main boot in your bios diff MB's have diff bios setup for this consult the mabnual
if using all sata's you will need a new card most mb's don't do 4 channel
some do
if you have 4 channel there is no jumper config
plugm in they should be ready for formatting