Second Hard Drive???

[busto]

Hey folks I was thinking about adding a second hard drive to my system what i want to know is am i going to have problems getting my system to reconize it, am i going to have to format the HD I already have(I don't want to have to do that hence just adding a hard drive). Would I just daisy chain the second one to the first? I'm running XP pro on a T-bird 1.2 with a 30 GB HD and 256 RAM....Any advice would be wonderful!

[Maxamus]

here is my setup, i hope it helps:

ABIT KG7-RAID
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Thunderbird 1.4GHz [133MHz FSB]
GlobalWIN WBK68 cooler
Aopen HQ-08 case with 300W PSU
256MB Crucial PC2100 CAS2.5 [in DIMM 1 - running at CL=2 - settings on FAST - DDR voltage at 2.75v]
256MB Crucial PC2100 CAS2.5 [in DIMM 2 - running at CL=2 - settings on FAST - DDR voltage at 2.75v]
256MB Crucial PC2100 CAS2.5 [in DIMM 3 - running at CL=2 - settings on FAST - DDR voltage at 2.75v]
ATI Radeon 64Mb DDR VIVO [in AGP Slot]
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Platinum 5.1 [in PCI Slot 2]
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100MBit 3C905C-TX NIC [in PCI Slot 4]
1 x IBM 60GXP 60Gb ATA/100 [disk on IDE1 as Master]
1 x IBM 75GXP 60Gb ATA/100 [disk on IDE3 as Master using HPTxx.2.3.0]
1 x Plextor PX-W1610TA 16x10x40 CDRW [on IDE2 as Master]
1 x Pioneer DVD-106S 16xDVD 48xCD [on IDE2 as Slave]
PS2 keyboard
Optical PS2 Mouse
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 452 19" (0.25) Shadow Flat DiamondTron monitor
Motorola SurfBoard SB3100 Cable Modem


Works without any problems!!!!!

[dx]

Yes, you can add a 2nd Hard Drive to your system (I have 4).
Installing it is fairly easy and most boxed Hard Drives come with good instructions on how to do it.

You WILL have to format it though as the drive manufacturer does not know what OS you are using MAC, Linux, Windows 9x
or NT. Its really easy to format though and in fact you can have
your system (Windows XP) format it for you. XP in fact recognises the drive on startup and walks you through the process of formatting. Its really painless!

The only trick is getting the right kind of drive for your motherboard. Unless you have a SCSI card, your first Hard Drive is an IDE. IDE's are easy to daisychain and you allowed to put two devices on each channel (cable).

Since a T-bird 1.2 is fairly recent as processors go, you have a Motherboard that supports most of the IDE Hard Drives out there.
I'm guessing that it is IDE-33 or IDE-66. Sound familiar? Does your computer come with specifications? Looking at you current Hard Drive will also work in a pinch.

What Hard Drive manufacturer to purchase and where to get it
are your choice. But Maxtor makes good drives and are pretty easy to find. IBM (my choice), Western Digital, and Seagate are others.

So for now do a little research, go get a good deal, and if you get stuck on installation...post here again and I or others will help you
the rest of the way.

[Shadey]

Note: Ultra DMA (UDMA)100 is also referred as ATA100,
in dxkim's case IDE-100

what harddrive are you using right now, and . . .
what UDMA mode is it currently using/capable of.

Just a few things to remember . . .

1. I'm doubtful that your motherboard supports UDMA 133 - so better check your motherboard manual before you buy one that uses UDMA 133. else you'd be wondering why its not running as fast as it should.

2. If you currently have a UDMA 100 devices - and its curently running in UDMA 100 mode - then you wont need to concern yourself with the following . . . otherwise - if you go and buy a UDMA 100 device - make sure you buy a 40-pin 80-conductor I****ble for 100MByte/sec transfer rates, i.e. to run the device in UDMA 100 mode

3.Having bought a new harddrive, when connecting it to the computer. Keep in mind that if you have harddrives running in different UDMA modes while connected to the SAME IDE channel - BOTH devices will run at the same speed as the slower harddrive. So if you don't want that to happen make sure they are on different IDE channels.

Thats all

[dx]

Note: Ultra DMA (UDMA)100 is also referred as ATA100, in dxkim's case IDE-100

Yep, Shadey caught my little error what I meant to say is...
IDE ATA-33 or IDE ATA-66, which is what I think you have. But he is right, it is possible that you have an ATA-100 (UDMA-100 ).

Again, your HD specs. will tell you what drive you have.

Thanks for the clarification shadey!

[stevarzo]

Yes, it is very easy and the instructions in the kit boxes are pretty good. I just installed a second hard drive in a system in order to make it dual boot (ME on the original drive, XP Pro on the second drive) and the only problem I had was that the version of Maxblast that Maxtor had put in the kit was the old version and it wanted to create about twelve partitions on the new drive. Once I downloaded the newest version of Maxblast from Maxtor everything went smoothly.

[Shadey]

@dxkim - sorry i didnt mean to sound as if i was correcting you - i just wanted busto to understand what i was going on about . . . i started talking about UDMA - so instead of correcting it all - i just stuck a note to save confusion . . .

[dx]

Originally posted by Shadey
@dxkim - sorry i didnt mean to sound as if i was correcting you - i just wanted busto to understand what i was going on about . . . i started talking about UDMA - so instead of correcting it all - i just stuck a note to save confusion . . .

Naa, no need to apologise man. If it made things clearer for busto its all that matters.

[busto]

I currently have a Maxtor 30 gig. It's the DiamondMax Plus 45 series so it's UDMA 100....I was thinking about just getting the same one or a 40 gig. Dxkim you said that since I'm running Xp it will find it suring start up and help me to format it does that mean i won't need to use MAxBlast??....I'm not trying to set up a dual boot(As much as i liked ME, XP has been flawless the 4 months I've been running it) so I'd like to make this as simple and painless as possible...By the way thanks for everyone's input

[dx]

Originally posted by busto
Dxkim you said that since I'm running Xp it will find it suring start up and help me to format it does that mean i won't need to use MAxBlast??....I'm not trying to set up a dual boot(As much as i liked ME, XP has been flawless the 4 months I've been running it) so I'd like to make this as simple and painless as possible...By the way thanks for everyone's input

Don't use MaxBlast with your new Maxtor drive. The program was written way back when Hard Drives began to get too large for BIOS support. Your motherboard's BIOS and WindowsXP will support the 40gig HD just fine. Plus, MaxBlast loads a proggie into your boot sector that is known to cause some problems. You don't need it.

Instead, you can use the Old School way of using a Win98 or ME startup disc and using fdisk at the A:\ prompt and partition the disc using large drive support. Then boot WinXP and windows will find the drive and ask you if you want to format it. Answer yes, and format it using NTFS file structure.

If you are uncomfortable using fdisk, just boot into WinXP as I think it will walk you through the partition process as well. If it doesn't just post here again and I will walk you through fdisk.
Its really easy.

[rlb245]

If I my ask what IRQ and DMA is that third controler using

[ThaiJan]

How do you stuff on 4 HD's + the rest?

Got a ASUS CUV4X PC133/VC133 AGP Pro/4X Motherboard. It has an onboard PCI Bus Master IDE controller with two connectors, so I'm limited to only 4 IDE devices on two channels. Two channels gives space for 4 devices. Right?

Before I had 2 HD's, 1 CDR and 1 CDRW. Have just added a DVDR and another CDRW. Couldn't find the additional space for that with only 2 channels, so I removed one of the HD's and the CDR. But from what you guys are telling, I understand that this is not right, there is a way to stuff it all into the computer. Have checked at ASUS, and all their Motherboards only got 2 connectors. How do you do this?

[fffclub]

ABIT KG7-RAID

The board has 4 ide slots, as long as you don't use the Raid function you can use them as normal ide

[dx]

Originally posted by ThaiJan
How do you stuff on 4 HD's + the rest?

Got a ASUS CUV4X PC133/VC133 AGP Pro/4X Motherboard. It has an onboard PCI Bus Master IDE controller with two connectors, so I'm limited to only 4 IDE devices on two channels. Two channels gives space for 4 devices. Right?

Before I had 2 HD's, 1 CDR and 1 CDRW. Have just added a DVDR and another CDRW. Couldn't find the additional space for that with only 2 channels, so I removed one of the HD's and the CDR. But from what you guys are telling, I understand that this is not right, there is a way to stuff it all into the computer. Have checked at ASUS, and all their Motherboards only got 2 connectors. How do you do this?

fffclub is right on the money (except I have a Abit KR7A-Raid ).
One word of advice though....only put your Hard Drives on the Raid controller (whether you use Raid or not) as regular IDE devices (CD-Rom, CDRW, DVD, ZIP, etc) will not work properly on them.
Reserve those devices for your non Raid controller.

[Maxamus]

i have ABIT KG7-RAID and it works sweet!@#!