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Adding new hard drive help

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I'm hoping someone can help me out a bit. I bought a 120G hard drive to add to my system, having troubles with it. This is basically what the story is - first of all added it to the IDE cable with the existing hard drive on it, system wouldn't boot on restart. Have tried new cables, that's not the problem, have tried different jumper configurations and that seems to be ok too. Strangely, I have got the system to boot up ONCE in this setup, recognised and formatted the new drive, and have been able to write to and read data from the new drive. Upon next startup, back to the old no boot problem. Frustrations getting high by this stage.
Under no circumstance have I been able to boot the system with old drive and new drive on same cable. From experimenting I have been able to get the machinery to work with the new drive on the same cable as the cd-rom though, only problem is it's as slow as an old mole on startup (about 6 minutes from power on to windows), and any mp3's, games with sound have the sound choppy. I'm not even sure I should have hard drive and cdrom cabled together?
The new hard drive has no physical space to go in this setup, it's just sitting on top of the floppy drive ATM which is far from perfect, so I want to eventually get it right and on the same cable as HD 1. Anyone got any ideas?
The only other thing I can think of is that I have my original HD partitioned, would that partition make any difference to the master/slave setup, perhaps I should remove the partition?
Went to the bloke I bought it from and he had less clue than me, so I thought I'd ask if there were any gurus here before I go parting with even more of the hard earned.
Any help appreciated.
 
Can you provide the following:

Operating System:
Hard Drive Brand old and size:
Hard Drive Brand new:

NakedDeadGuy said:
Under no circumstance have I been able to boot the system with old drive and new drive on same cable.

this to me sounds like a jumper problem. You need to set the old one as Master (MA), and the new one on Slave(SL), on the same cable. Basically the old drive the pin should be on Cable select, the new drive as Slave, now since the master one is Cable select you might need to swap the cable connector around, so the old drive is on the last connector and the new one is on the middle connector.

look at this guide it may help:

http://www.helpwithpcs.com/upgrading/install-hard-drive.htm#install-new-hard-drive
 
I have to disagree with Feher, if you're getting it to boot up once and then it doesn't boot up next time when nothing else has change, then it isn't jumper setting, that would just stop it full stop.

The two things that I suspect are a) the new drive is a lemon (see if the bloke you bought it off will swap it to see if the problems remain) or b) your motherboard is stressing for some reason, perhaps it's because the new drive is SATA. Update your bios.
 
OK guys, OS is xp, new hd is hitachi deskstar model #HDS722512VLAT80 120G (parallel-ata). Old hd is a MAXTOR 4K040H2 40G.
Jim, could you explain a little further about updating BIOS?
I really don't think it's the jumpering, because I have tried every combination - from the way it should be set, to everything else out of sheer desperation. As stated, it's chugging along beautifully right now on the same cable as cd-rom, so I'm not thinking that the new HD itself is faulty.
Anyhow, thanks guys, I'll keep plugging away.
 

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NakedDeadGuy said:
Jim, could you explain a little further about updating BIOS?
Get the model number of your motherboard and go to it's website's support section. You should be able to download an updated bios from there. However make sure that you follow the instructions absolutely to the letter because if you bugger up the installation (and that's very unlikely, unless you pull the powercord midway through) you're motherboard will be irrepairably buggered.

As far as the jumper settings go, just make sure that each cable has only one master device and one slave device.
 
Maxtor Jumper Settings on this site (don't worry about the max size thingo on the site):

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...t/ATA Hard Drives/Desktop/DiamondMax D540X-4K

choose Jumper Settings from Installation Drop down box.

Set this as Cable Select with AC, bottom right picture. Plug this drive into the Last Connector on the IDE

Hitachi Jumper Settings site:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d7k250/d7k250jum.htm

Set the jumper as Device 1 (Slave) under the heading of 16 Logical Head Settings (normal use)

On the same cable as your Maxtor HDD, connect this to the middle IDE Connector.

see this site:

http://www.helpwithpcs.com/upgrading/install-hard-drive.htm#install-new-hard-drive

scroll down to see the picture of where the master and slave connector is on the ide cable.
 

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Adding new hard drive help

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