Installing a second drive on new ATA/133 controller card questions.

[thelegendofzaku]

In the near future, I'm planning to add a second hard drive to my P4 Windows XP Pro PC, but not just any drive, I plan on getting a huge 250 GB ATA/133 drive. I already know that I'll need a ATA/133 controller card to support it's full capacity since my mobo can only go up to ATA/100, thus will get chewed up by the 137 GB barrier if I were to install it from my motherboard. What I wanna know is what jumper settings must I use if I were to hook up the drive in the controller card? In other words, once connected to the new card, would I have to set it on slave as usual and plug it into the second connector of the ATA cable or can I get by if I set it on master and connect it to the first connector?

 

[Rik]

The easiest thing to do is to set hdd's to cable select, the pc will sort them out for you. The one on the end of the cable will be master and the other will be slave, its as easy as that.

 

[thelegendofzaku]

So lemme get this straight, so I have to set the new HD on cable select or all of my HD's on that setting? In other words, will I have to reconnect all of my drives on the new controller card with that setting? I just wanna make sure I don't screw over my PC if I do that to my master drive. Can you elaborate on the pros and cons of putting all of my HD's on cable select in the new controller card as well as putting only the new one on that setting?

 

[tdeg]

If you are going to buy a new card to attach this drive to and it is the only thing attached to the card, you set it to master. This is just the easiest way. You don't know if the card supports cable select or not, just just set to master.

I would install the card and then boot Windows. After you get the new card all properly set up and drivers installed I would then shutdown and attach the drive. After you reboot, you will need to do what it says to do here.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

After that you will need to go into windows Disk Management and write a signature to the drive and set up your partitions.