Hard Drive Questions.

OK, so I had a HP Digital Entertainment Center with a 250gig Sata hard drive, and a copy of windows MCE installed. The power supply died and I would like to add said hard drive to my main machine.

On my main machine I have 4 sata ports available, and more than enough power from my power supply. I also currently just have one 250gig HD. I know how to set master/slave and am not interested in RAID.

My questions are these, I assume due to the windows install on the HD I will be adding that this is not simply going to be as easy as plug in power/sata cable and I am good to go.

So how will I go about doing this? How am I going to format the hard drive I am adding?

Thanks!

Agreed, It seems common to assume that putting another drive with an OS on it in your computer would mess something up....but normally from my experience its never caused an issue, due to it not being the boot drive...

So yeah plug it in, turn on the puter, save any data you want then go to my computer, right click on the drive and select format....use the default settings and name it if you want, let it do its thing and you're done.

I do it all the time actually, Its the easiest way to test someones hard drive...or to recover data from a drive that refuses to boot.

As long as both drives are SATA, there shouldn't be any issues. There are no jumpers to set, just plug it in. If you are paranoid, go into the bios and make sure that the old (original) drive is still set as the boot drive.

You can actually setup up a dual boot situation if you wanted to. Set the new drive up as the boot drive, and try to enter safe mode. Load all the new device drivers, and you can enter the bios and switch back and forth as you want/need.

Hi,Im new here, I need help. My hard drive is 80GB, it was partitioned into two C:\ drive which was 30GB and E:\ which was 50GB. My old pc where the HD was installed crashed so I bought a new computer with a 60GB HDD. I transferred my 80GB HDD to my new pc following the PIN configuration master-slave... However, when I checked MyComputer, it only gives me 2 drives (C: (30GB) and E: (60GB)) which should have been 3.


I check my HD capacity, it only gives me 30GB space. so my other partition (50GB)is missing. What should I do? Thanks in advance...