installing a second hd

[herculesCA]

im looking into installing a second internal hard drive in my computer and i wanted to know if that is an easy thing to do. Will it just be a "plug & play" type of deal? Also do u need to install a new os? my computer has available 2 PCI and 1 ISA slots. Is that what is needed? Also, what is dual boot, is that needed? I would appreciate all the advise I can get.

Specs:
HP Pavilion 8670c
P3 600mhz
128mb
30g HD

[BubbaLeroy]

Please don’t take offense to my comment. With the questions you asked… Please take the computer to a tech for the hard drive installation.

[Craig Tucker]

You need a free connector on one of the IDE channels to connect another IDE device (hard drive). Most motherboards have 2 IDE channels which can each control 2 devices (4 devices in total). So you need to check that you have a free connector on one of the ribbon cables attached to an IDE channel. A lot of newer motherboard now also have 2 raid channels which you can also connect IDE devices to, in this instance you can have up to 8 IDE devices connected. 2 IDE channels + 2 raid channels each allowing 2 devices per channel = 8 devices. If you don't have a free IDE connector, all is not lost. You could install an IDE controller (this you would install in a PCI slot, not a hard drive)


Hard drives are not plug and play you need to create a primary drive partition and format it before you can use the disc.

There is no need for a new OS, but depending on the OS you have will depend on how easy it is to set your new hard drive up. With XP it is very easy and can be done within the disc management utility.

If you have win98 then you use a utility called fdisc from within dos to create the primary partition, you can then format it.

Dual boot is when you choose on startup to boot from a choice of hard drives, this allows the use of more than 1 operating system on a PC, you do not need to concern yourself with this it is not required for an additional hard drive.

This may all sound a bit complicated but it is not that difficult, but it may be best to have someone who knows what they are doing show you for the first time.

[WeedVender]

Easiest thing in the world.

But as other people said, GET HELP IF YOU DONT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING !

[RabidDog]

its one of the easiest things to do on a computer, BUT if you do not know what you are doing then get a shop (or a knowledgeable friend) asyou could nuke up your system.