Slave drive

Can I plug my compaq "quantum" hard drive into my new Dell "XP" on the middle clip of ribbon. A scribble labeled "auto" I hope means it doesn't need a jumper to designate itself as "slave." ???? Then I understand from reading I find a new power lead and plug it into old drive, then possibly follow directions in "disk management" segment to create "partition?" I simply want to be able to edit and print old files written in ancient "works" windows 95. Real dumb about this stuff, guy. Please help.

 

Last time I worked on a DELL, they are configuring their hard drives as CABLE SELECT. Which means you should be able to take that slave drive and boot it up and the DELL BIOS should find it ok, pluggin it into the middle connector on the same IDE channel. "grey color"

You do not create a parition. If the drive already has data on it, then a parition was created long ago. Lucky for you, Windows XP can read a FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS partition.

So when you get into Windows, your drive will appear as the next drive letter providing the DELL BIOS auto detected the slave drive in cable select mode.