Switching out Hard Drive

[KrugSmash]

I recently bought a new hard drive for my computer, and I wanted to transfer all of my data over to the new one, but I've been running into some issues remembering how to do it.

The new drive is a 640GB WD Caviar Blue, and the old one is also Western Digital. They are both SATA drives.

I first plugged in the new drive and formatted it and installed my OS, but now I can't recall how I get the data from the old to the new. I seem to think that I need to somehow set the old drive up as the master and the new one as a slave, and that to do so I would use a jumper to cross two of the pins on the back of the drive, but I don't have a jumper(none came with the drive), nor do I know where to get one, nor the configuration I'd use if I did have one.

I tried just hooking them up once, but to no avail. I have the single power strip hooked to both, and 2 data cables each hooking a drive to the mobo, and I have entered the BIOS and activated drive 1 in addition to drive 0.

Also, once I do get a jumper or two, what's the best way to transfer my crap?

 

[RetiredChief]

For a starter - ther are no master/slave jumpers for SATA drives as they are each on ther own channel.

You should be able to plug both drives in and they should both come up in my computer.
Then you can just copy data/your files from one to the other. (can not trainsfer programs this way as they need to be installed.

You could have cloned the old drive to the new one, But I prefer reinstalling. You can just leave the old rive in your system. After transfering all your files, just reformat it and use for additional storage.

 

[KrugSmash]

Ah, I made a rather silly mistake. I didn't realize that my computer had 4 slots for data cables and plugged into slot #2 thinking it was #1. Now I've got it straight. All solved.