I want to add a second hard drive in my computer. How do I hook this up and what settings do the jumpers have to be? I have information on this drive I would like to put on my computer both have XP on them. Is this possible??? Please help. :confused:

Easy solution: Set both hard drives to "CS" or "cable select" and put them on the same data cable.

Please re-type that second sentence or explain it better, I think you might have mistyped it and left a verb or two out ;) I couldn't get at what you mean. I can show you how to "mirror" your XP install and data to the new drive pretty easily (in fact, the instructions on the drive might tell ya - drives usually come with a floppy disc with the tools to do this). It's also possible to ut XP on both, but pointless, so ... explain.

I suggest Seagate Drives. All of their drives come with a 5yr warranty from failure or defect. Maxtor and Western Digital come with a 1yr warranty, as do a lot of Hitachi and Fujitsu.

I don't need XP on both, just the info stored on the second drive. As far as the "jumpers" on the back of the drives, is there a certain configuration these have to be set at? I didn't know if the main drive is the "master" and the second one was set as "slave" or??? To clear this up a little, I have a gateway computer, and want to put a drive in that I had from another computer. I hope this helps. ?????????????

Like I said - you have three options - Slave, Master or Cable Select. I will repost something I posted in another thread on this:

I'm sure you know already that the drives have a plastic "jumper" on the back of them. This sets the drive as "slave", "master" or "CS" which stands for "cable select". Each single cable can have one master and one slave *or* two cable select drives. You can't easily mix "cable select" with master and slave and make it work, so make sure you do either master/slave OR all cable select for EACH cable. Example: you can do master/slave on one cable and cable select on the other. Just don't mix cable select and master/slave on the SAME cable.

Understand something: "Cable select" simply means "whichever drive is first on the ribbon cable is master and the one at the end of the cable is slave". If you already knew this stuff, I apologize. To reiterate, Setting the jumpers on the back determines if they will be "slave" or "master" - if you setup two drives on the same cable with jumpers at "Cable Select", one will automatically become master and the other automatically slave based on whether they're plugged into the first or second port on the cable (hence "cable select" - the cable selects which they will be!).

You have three ports on the main board of the computer you can plug ribbon cables into. One is the floppy (the smaller of the three) and the other two are the exact same sized ports and are called "IDE" ports for larger drives like hard drives and CDROM drives. They are often silkscreen labelled in white ink on the mainboard as "IDE 0" and "IDE 1" *or* "IDE 1" and "IDE 2". The lower numbered one is your "primary" IDE port and the higher numbered one is the "secondary" IDE port.

So, in essence, you can setup to have four drives:
primary master
primary slave
secondary master
secondary slave

IMO, I would leave the CDROM on its own cable with the jumpers as-is. It should be plugged into the Secondary IDE port and the jumper set to either "Master" or "Cable Select" - if it's not, then put it on its own cable and set the jumper as I just said.

Pull the hard drives out - set them both up for "Cable Select". Install both of them on one cable and plug it into the Primary IDE port. If you have problems on boot or Windows will not boot with the new configuration, manually remove both drives and set the jumper on the original hard drive to "master" and the new drive to "slave". If problems still persist, come back here and make a post.


I explained this in my last post. If any of it is still unclear after this post, let me know.

Thank you SHIFTY for the help. I got it set up tonight and finally got my info back on a working computer. You're the best man!!

No problemo. If you need any other help, hardware advice or suggestions, gimme a holler.