Adding a Second Harddrive

[DrunkenTigah85]

I am having trouble adding a second harddrive to my Dell Dimension L566cx.

I am installing a new 40Gb Western Digital Harddrive 72000.

Alright heres' the thing. I need a power spliter because my stupid dell is gay and it does not have enough power supply, therefore for now I am taking the power from the zip and putting it into the new harddrive.

I connect everything, I have set both harddrives as cable select (I tried putting the old harddrive as master, and the new as slave -however did not work-). I take the zip power into the harddrive. I turn on the computer. I put in my win98 boot disk, boot up with the choice number 1 which is "start with cd". :bawl: I try to look for my cd rom drive by pressing d: e: a: c: on the dos prompt. The C:\ comes out to be the new hard drive, d:\ as the old, a:\ as the floppy, and the flopppy (a:\) loaded everything to E:\.

Oh yah while i was doing this I went across a problem. I took the power out of the zip and put it into the new harddrive right? Well now the CD doesn't work? When I try to open it it does not open, is it maybe because the power cord is connected to the zip?

I am not a pro at computers, however i heard it was easy to install a second harddrive.. now i am in trouble. :confused: Anyone have any idea whats going on? If you have any more questions about my computer please e-mail me at [email protected]

please help`!! how much is the usual service charge to install a hard drive at local computer stores?

[rajatQ2]

well it sounds like you have your power cables mixed up. cd-rom drives will always open, regardless of what sort of screwed up settings and connections you have, as long as you have the power connected.
I would recommend maybe pulling out a couple of the devices (or at least pulling out their power cables and ide cables) until you have your hard drive working properly.

things to take note of:
1. you mother board will have 2 ide "Channels", which means that you can put two devices on each channel. One Channel is labeled Primary, the other one is Secondary. you always want your boot hard drive to be on the primary.
So, if i were you, i would disconnect my cd-rom and zip disk temporarily, and put your current boot drive as your Primary Master, and put your new hard drive as your Secondary master. as long as you can boot to windows now, you will be able to format your new hard drive through windows. Dont forget to set both drives as "masters".
Then later on when you have the new drive working, you could add your zip disk as your primary slave, and your cdrom as your secondary slave, so that you dont have to mess with the hard drisks.
Good Luck

[rajatQ2]

Originally posted by rajatQ2
One Channel is labeled Primary, the other one is Secondary. you always want your boot hard drive to be on the primary.Good Luck

forgot to mention, you should be able to find out which channel the ide cables belong to by looking for "IDE 0" and "IDE 1" on the motherboard. It might also say primary and secondary, but i have seen (nice) tiawanese motherboards with the spelling of primary and secondary hopelessly butchered.

[Grimm]

1st, put things back how they were.

Go get the power splitter and hook up power that way.
Never use Cable Select. Set your old drive to master with slave (some have more that one master setting). Set the new drive to slave.
Place both the hard drives on the same IDE chanel (that means use the same cable).

Boot up and see what you get.

/edit/
Damn... looks like I type way too slow...