slave harddrive

Not sure if I am posting this in the right area or not but here goes.. I have a Dell computer ( running xp) with a 10 gig hard drive .... I was just recently given a 40 gig that I would like to put into the pc. what I would like to do is to have the 40 gig as my main drive and use the 10 gig mainly for storage of pictures etc, is there a specific way I must connect the two in order to make the smaller harddrive accessible as the "slave drive" ? **there is plenty of space to house both harddrives**

thanks so much for your help

 

with my dell computer with xp i was told to use cable select and have had no problems

 

As pointed out Dell's usuallly use the cable select jumper setting on the drive. How is your present hard drive hooked up? Is it by itself on the cable or is there another drive already sharing the cable. What model Dell do you have?

 

My Dell is a optiplex gx1 and there is only one harddrive installed at the moment ..

 

If there is nothing else on the cable with the hard drive that is now in your system, make sure that both hard drives have their jumpers set to cable select. Your new hard drive should be attached to the connector at the end of the cable and the old hard drive would be attached to the middle connector. This would make the new drive the "master" and the old drive the "slave". Your operating system will then need to be installed to the new drive.

 

Dells usually come with an IDE cable that permits only one hard drive. If yours is this way, you will have to obtain a new 80 conductor IDE cable with the connections for 2 hard drives. Set the jumpers on both drives to the "CS" (cable select) position. Connect the drive you want to be the Master (Primary) drive to the end of the cable furthest from the Motherboard, connect your slave drive to the center connector. You will of course be reinstalling your OS and your other programs again onto the new hard drive. You dont have to erase everything off your old hard drive until you have your new harddrive running right. Then you can temporarily move the data files you want to keep to a temp directory on your new hard drive then reformat the old hard drive. and viola, you have your storage drive.

 

well I installed the two hard drives ..had the pc up and running . .was able to access both harddrives and everything . THEN .. the pc froze .. and after quite some time I finally did a cold reboot..... now I get a black screen with the error "windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt system32/drivers/ntfs.sys" it says I can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows setup using the original set CD_ROM ***which I dont seem to have .. what I have is the CD for reinstall of windows . the resource CD and a floppy which is the Dell factory image restore floppy......... HELPPPPPPPPPPP NOW WHAT DO I DO???????????????

 

Do you know anyone from whom you can borrow a full WindowsXP CD?

 

No (

 

Better return it to your original configuration with the HDD's like they were. It's not nice to fool with windows XP (theme of 2001 a space odyssey playing in background).
Make sure your xp hddrive is master or it won't work. I can't even get it to cooperate any other way even if I use bootmagic. Format the 40 gig and use it for storage. Personally I use my small drive for the OS and the big one for storage anyway. If your lucky, winxp will recover.

 

thank you so much for All your help