adding Second hard Drive and CW PART 2

[DavidK]

I am about to do it, finally. I found a 40gig maxtor, 7200 RPM for $100.

Before I enter this Brave New World, can one of you experts read this please: http://www.hp.com/cposupport/persona.../bph03429.html

Just step 4, 1-3 seem pretty simple. Is this good advice? Does this make sense? I am especially worried about the last step, formatting the hard Drive. I dont know what that means.

C,mon guys, get your butts to Cleveland, ya Bums. I can take you to the Rock Hall of Fame ( Your treat, tickets are outrageous), and we can:

1. Admire Madonna's Bra's
2. View Michael Jackson's original nose
3. Try on Meatloaf's Pants
4. Check out stuff that fell out of ZZTop's Beards

I have an HP Celery 566
256 RAM
SONAR
Wavelab
15gig 5400rpm "C" drive
Kitten named Simon


Any help is great. I will be thankin people at the next Grammys, maybe (insert name here) will be mentioned.

[dachay2tnr]

I didn't read steps 1-3, but adding a second hard drive is not a difficult thing.

Step 4 basically involves partitioning the HD and formatting it. This is essentially just getting it ready so it can accept data.

Since the hard drive you are installing has no data on it at this point, your fears are somewhat misplaced. You really can't screw it up too badly, and even if you do, you won't be losing any data (unless you format your first hard drive by mistake ).

The instructions from HP seem pretty straightfoward and correct. Although in step 13 you could break the drive in a couple of logical drives if you wanted. There is no right or wrong here, just mainly how you intend to use it. If you are using it exclusively to hold your wave data, then follow their instructions and partition it as a single 40 Gb drive.

[Paul881]

David,

Much as I would love to have you take me around the rock hall of fame, time off from work and the cost of the flight from the UK might be a problem

However, Dachay is right, the thinking about it is worse than the doing. If I can do it, anyone can. If you want to make life even easier for yourself, go buy a copy of Partition Magic for $29 which allows you to format drives without all that fdisk stuff in dos. This will make step 4 of the HP instructions redundant. You will find it a useful program later to insert partitions on your Hard drives and to manage all that sort of stuff. Its a great program for the dos and computer challenged people like me!

The only thing that I had to do is tweak the bios, I had to make the list of drives (two hard drives and two cd's) Auto sense instead of Manual so my system could "see" them. My computer was set-up that way in the beginning by the manufacturer. Again, this sounds more scary than it was.

If you have problems, it ain't going to screw your existing drive. You can always revert to how it was if you do have problems. I had all sorts of hassle cos I got my master and slave drive jumpers all cocked up, but I got there in the end, trial and error, took about an hour all in all.

I take it you will make your existing drive C: (master) on IDE cable 1 and your new drive master of IDE cable 2. Any CD/R's you have will then be slaves to the hard drives.

[ChuckU]

David,
I agree with the other guys, especially the part about putting the new drive on the secondary master. I have the same hard drive as you. Come to think of it, I have it because of you from an earlier post. When you open up the computer, your current C: drive will be primary master on a ribbon cable. Make sure your CD rom is also on this cable and that the jumper is in the slave position. On the other cable, install the new HD. Put the jumper in the master position. If you have a second CDrom drive (like a burner), put it on this cable also. Make sure the jumper is in the slave position.
WARNING WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART.
Once all the drives are physically in place and jumpers configured, take the floppy and CD that came with your new drive and put them in their respective drives.
Turn the computer on.
The system will boot off the floppy and take you through a utility that helps you configure your new drive. Follow the instructions. If it gives you the option of formatting NTFS or FAT32, use FAT32 because there's no way you're running Win2k or NT and you want to match the formatting on the C: drive. This goes very quickly because you're not really formatting the entire disk, just the file allocation tables....blah, blah, blah.
Good luck. Let us know if you get stuck.

[Paul881]

David, I have now had time to read the step 4 of the HP site and it all seems straight forward, I would be inclined to have a go at it. As it points out, WHATEVER YOU DO DO NOT FSDISK DISK No 1. This will wipe your primary (existing) hard disk. As long as you select drive no 2, you will be fine. Thats the only no-no really. Oh, and don't forget to fully back up your hard drive but I guess like all of us you do that weekly, right

And like I say, if you wish to err on the side of caution and avoid all that dos stuff, you can always use Partition Magic 7.0.