adding slave HDD

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Guest

Hello

I have a brandnew Dell with Windows XP SP2.

This link shows a rough idea of how the inside of my PC looks:
http://www.computerfix.org/ebay/No_Cover.JPG
If you look where the hard drive is, you will see where I will put my old
HDD as slave in the bottom slot.
The problem is I don’t recognise the cabling, im sure my old pc used IDE for
the HDD's.
I’m guessing that the cable to the right hand side of the HDD slots (orange
black red black white) is to power the HDD's.
I have no idea what the blue cable is to its left, maybe its SATA.
The HDD I want as slave is an IDE.

Please can you explain to me where I plug in my IED slave HDD in the
simplest way possible.

Many thanks
 
Shane said:
Hello

I have a brandnew Dell with Windows XP SP2.

This link shows a rough idea of how the inside of my PC looks:
http://www.computerfix.org/ebay/No_Cover.JPG
If you look where the hard drive is, you will see where I will put my old
HDD as slave in the bottom slot.
The problem is I don’t recognise the cabling, im sure my old pc used IDE
for the HDD's.
I’m guessing that the cable to the right hand side of the HDD slots
(orange black red black white) is to power the HDD's.
I have no idea what the blue cable is to its left, maybe its SATA.
The HDD I want as slave is an IDE.

Please can you explain to me where I plug in my IED slave HDD in the
simplest way possible.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the picture - it made it extremely easy. Your old hard drive is
IDE. Your new drives are SATA. Your CD/DVD drive is IDE. It looks like you
have only one optical drive. You can connect the IDE drive to the same
motherboard connector used by the optical drive. Dells like jumper settings
of Cable Select, but because of the placement of the hard drive/optical
drive you'll need to use master/slave. (Cable Select means the position of
the drives on the ribbon cable determines master/slave and the first
connector - nearest the motherboard and near the old hard drive - is for
slave. You don't want a hard drive as slave to an optical drive.)

Your old hard drive probably is correctly jumpered already as Master. Chance
the jumper on the optical drive to Slave. Connect the old hard drive to the
same ribbon cable used by the optical drive. Connect one of the molex power
supply connectors to the old hard drive. See if this works.

Make sure the power supply that came with the computer is adequate for three
hard drives and an optical drive.

If you are unsure about doing this, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop (not your local version of BigStoreUSA).

Malke
 
Thanks for replying

Unlike the image, I actually have two optical drives fitted.

A friend of mine who does lots of work with computers has just sent me a
text message in response to a panicky text I sent him earlier today.

He wrote "your not screwed!, just use a cable out of your old PC and plug
the HDD into an IDE interface on the motherboard".

Iv taken onboard everything you have kindly written and what my friend has
told me.

Ill let you know how I get on tomorrow.
 
Shane said:
Thanks for replying

Unlike the image, I actually have two optical drives fitted.

A friend of mine who does lots of work with computers has just sent me a
text message in response to a panicky text I sent him earlier today.

He wrote "your not screwed!, just use a cable out of your old PC and plug
the HDD into an IDE interface on the motherboard".

Iv taken onboard everything you have kindly written and what my friend has
told me.

Ill let you know how I get on tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Good. I couldn't tell if there was another IDE connector on the motherboard
or not. If you have problems, have your friend come over. It's good to have
techie friends. ;-)

Malke
 
Thanks again for all of your help people.

In the end I hooked up each of my old slave HDD's one after the other to an
IDE cable connected to my DVD drive.
Transfering 200+ gig of movies sure took a long time but it worked :)
Then I went out and purchased a nice new 320GB SATA HDD as my new slave.

This new PC sure is a learning curve for a newbie like me, and im glad I did
it without anyone coming out to help me (apart from the help here of course).
 
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