Installing additional HD

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by brizzoluk, Jul 7, 2008.

  1. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    Hi guys i been fiddling around with my old pc and i have been trying to install an extra hard drive in it for extra storage.
    I have a pile of old hard drives which i know work but they are from gaming machines and i think they are formatted differently as i cant get them to work.
    An ex friend of mine installed one of these in this pc before so i know it can be done i just dont have the tech knowledge to do it :(
    When i install the drive i can hear it going but my pc is not detecting it so i cant format it, i have set it up as a slave drive and i have looked in the bios to see if there is anything obvious but i cant see anything.

    any help much appreciated
     
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  2. greenbrucelee
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    greenbrucelee Zettabyte Poster

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    I take it the hard drive is a normal IDE hard drive and not SATA (if it is SATA you don't need to set the jumpers)

    Is the other hard drive ste as master?

    Have you connected the molex connecter the correct way?
     
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  3. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    yes its a normal IDE drive and it has a diagram to set the jumpers and the connectors are the right way round.
     
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  4. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    the other drive is the original master drive which i havnt touched.
     
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  5. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    Is the second drive shown in Disk Management when you boot into Windows?
     
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  6. greenbrucelee
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    Sounds like a silly question but is the hard drive connected to the correct controller on the ribbon cable?
     
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  7. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    No the second drive isnt showing up in disc management or my computer.
     
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  8. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    yeh the ribbon cable only has 2 connectors on it and its pretty idiot proof as they are labled slave/master.
    Would it have anything to do with the file system? and if so is there any way of changing the file system on the drive if i cant detect it?
     
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  9. greenbrucelee
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    I'm pretty sure that it should still show up in bios, regardless of wether its NTFS or FAT32 etc.
     
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  10. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    No matter what the file system if Windows could see the drive it would show up in Disk management, even if it had no partitions on it at all. If the jumpers are set right and you have data and power on the drive it is probably going to be a BIOS option your missing.
     
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  11. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    Yep, the BIOS doesn't care about the file system, the thing could be formatted in a Linux ext2 file system it should still show in the BIOS.
     
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  12. greenbrucelee
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    greenbrucelee Zettabyte Poster

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    So it's either busted or the jumpers are not set right imo.
     
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  13. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    or something needs to be switched on in the BIOS.
     
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  14. Theprof

    Theprof Petabyte Poster

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    I would try setting the second drive to cable select, I think it's labled CS on the hard drive. See if that works.
     
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  15. greenbrucelee
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    When you go into BIOS try and find a secondry hard disk option (will be under the main drive), you may have to select it to AUTO.
     
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  16. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    well i have tried 3 different drives and the jumpers are set right according to the diagram which says no jumpers=slave.
    Im not very knowledgable about the bios settings is there anything i should check?
     
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  17. greenbrucelee
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    greenbrucelee Zettabyte Poster

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    when you go into bios, it should display whay your system has i.e cpu hard drive etc. Where it shows the hard drive section it should be set to auto detect (or something to that effect) if it doesn't then change it.
     
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  18. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    in the main bios menu it lists time/date etc then it lists
    primary master - original hd
    primary slave - none (i have gone into this and the type is set to auto
    secondary master - CR-4804TE-(SM)
    secondary slave - none
     
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  19. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    Try and connect the drive as a master on IDE controller two with your CD drive as the slave.
     
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  20. brizzoluk

    brizzoluk Kilobyte Poster

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    not entirely sure what you mean by that?
    i only have one IDE output on the motherboard.
     
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