PC question, adding hard drive

[Richard]

I'm doing a favor for a friend and will ultimately be adding a hard drive. She's got some issues on her current drive so I'm going to install a new drive as her C drive. Once it's up and running, will install the second drive (which is her current C drive) I'll attempt to move her files over and will format the second drive which will then be "D".

My simple question is, the ribbon that connects the drives to the mother board will have two "plugs" on it. One plug is for "C" and other for "D".

Which plug will go into the C drive, the end plug or the middle plug?

Thanks

 

[Jimbrown]

It does not make any difference you set the drives with the dip switches on the drives. Most new drives come with software or at least a link to download software that will clone the drives

 

[KubotaSteve]

My brother did that to my old computer and it seems like it didn't matter but he just made sure to set the jumpers for a master and a slave drive. I'm thinking the middle one should go to the master drive to be on safe side. The computer will normally assign the letter designations. I'm no computer guy but my brother is into them pretty good and knows his way around and I try to watch him when he's working on mine.

 

[Richard]

I'd forgotten about the jumpers When I looked at them, the new one is on "CS" for cable select.

I don't want to remove one of them if I don't need to, so I'll either fiddle with cable and swap it, or remove the HD and change it to master/slave.

 

[texbaylea]

Richard

Assuming the motherboard supports "cable select" and the cable itself also supports cable select then the end plug is "C" drive and the middle plug is "D". This requires that both drives are set to CS. Does your friend have a hardware manual for the mother board to tell you if it supports cable select?

My current PCs are set up with cable select since it is the easiest to do and I build my own. If your friends PC was a branded unit you may not have any options and will have to go with master/slave.

Vernon

 

[dfkrug]

Richard

Assuming the motherboard supports "cable select" and the cable itself also supports cable select then the end plug is "C" drive and the middle plug is "D". This requires that both drives are set to CS. Does your friend have a hardware manual for the mother board to tell you if it supports cable select?

My current PCs are set up with cable select since it is the easiest to do and I build my own. If your friends PC was a branded unit you may not have any options and will have to go with master/slave.

Vernon

Dell Dimensions support Cable Select. I have been thru it a number of
times and CS is the easiest. Hopefully other "name brands" do, too. I no
longer build any PCs cuz Dells are so cheap.

 

[Richard]

Well, you all might get a kick out of my day.

I'm comfortable dealing with jumpers. I ended up changing them to make it work.

I removed her old drive, set new one. Did a full format, installed windows, installed ALL windows updates. I probably spent about 2 hours getting to this point (all while at work )

She showed up and I was thinking I'd be done in 30 more minutes, then something odd hit me. I noticed that her drive was "I" and not "C"????

Long story short, it seems her other drives (the little card readers) were seen by the pc first and it assigned the new drive "I". I tried to change it but since it was my root drive, it wouldn't let me.

I had to quick format and reinstall everything again.

After this point of getting everything working, I installed her OLD drive and started to move files over. After that was done, I formatted her old drive.

Here's something that gave me a kick... she said (mind you, she's about 74 years old), anyway, she said she KNEW she was having a problem because she'd not received an email in something like 90 minutes.

?? huh? 90 minutes?

After I got everything working, I finally "got it"

She had like 16,468 emails in her inbox. Probably 15,000 of them unread. I think she's a "subscriber-holic" to anything she can do where they send her 'news updates'.

I was going to help her delete most of them (I figured we'd have 200 left when I was done) but she wasn't having any of that.

I pointed to one email, she said she wanted to keep it. I said "Betty, you've not read this one yet (marked unread) AND it's dated 2002... I think we can probably get rid of it"

"nooooooo, I want to keep that one, I'll look at it later"

So, after that, I realized she actually seems to LIKE all these (junk) emails so I said I'd move them all over and let her go through them at her leisure.

Figured I'd be done at 2:00 today and I didn't leave office until 6:30. On fridays I usually leave pretty soon after 3:00 and for SURE at 4:00.

So, this one was a freebie for one of my favorite clients. I got home & asked my wife if I had lipstick on my cheek (I got a hug & kiss when my client left). My wife looked at me and said "are you going around kissing other women?"

I said "nope, THEY'RE going around, KISSING ME!!!"

 

[jinman]

Richard, here's a quick way to just transfer files from an old drive to a new one (data files and even desktop if you know where to look). Just unplug the CD or DVD drive and use it's cables to attach the old drive. When you start up the computer, it will find the old drive and automatically install it. Because it is the CD, the drive letter will show up as "D:". This has worked on all the Dell computers we have in our company. I just transferred the contents of a 12 gig drive to an 80 gig C-drive yesterday in about 30 minutes. When I was finished, I reinstalled the cable to the CD drive and was back in business in a flash.

 

[MossRoad]

Richard, here's a quick way to just transfer files from an old drive to a new one (data files and even desktop if you know where to look). Just unplug the CD or DVD drive and use it's cables to attach the old drive. When you start up the computer, it will find the old drive and automatically install it. Because it is the CD, the drive letter will show up as "D:". This has worked on all the Dell computers we have in our company. I just transferred the contents of a 12 gig drive to an 80 gig C-drive yesterday in about 30 minutes. When I was finished, I reinstalled the cable to the CD drive and was back in business in a flash.

Yep. That's the way we roll out new PCs. First we build one, then ghost its hard drive to an image file on a second hard drive. From that point on, we just pull a PC out of the box, pop the side cover, pull the cable on the CD or DVD, plug in the hard drive, boot off a USB device, and copy the drive image over the C drive on the new PC. It takes about 4-5 minutes to build a new PC. Works great.