Installing 2 old Hard Drives?

[Sadamto]

Hello, I recently sold a computer to a mate and have been given it's HD back and also I've scavenged a HD from my older computer and now I want to install these into my current computer. I've never installed more than 1 HD and would like to know what to do. I'm fine with physically installing them but don't know how to set up slave and master etc.

Also, both the HD's have an OS installed, one is XP 32bit and the other is Vista 32bit. I want to uninstall these once they're on my current PC which has windows 7 64bit installed.

So what is the process?

Thanks in advance.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

Need a little more info from you so everyone can think about the same situation.

What motherboard do you have on your present Win-7 64 computer? Manufacturer, Model, Version. Also what HDD(s) do you presently have on it, Model, Sata vs IDE, one large partition vs several partitions. A good way to gather all that stuff is to go to Disk Management, in the lower table it shows you how your HDD is set up - Basic, 100MB hidden partition?, Active NTFS Healthy partition, size?, unallocated space?.

Finally, what are the model #'s of the older drives you want to attach, IDE vs SATA, size of each.

The process of attaching an additional one or two HDD's to a current system, and formatting them is straight forward, knowing the model, whether IDE or SATA, 5400 or 7200 RPM, will give you the best direction and advice.

And besides, it is a good learning experience and a good dose of self confidence to be able to add devices to your computer.

 

[Sadamto]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte UD5P

My current HDD in HDD management tells me it is Basic, has 100MB system reserved NTFS, Healthy and 465GB NTFS, Healthy.

My current HDD's model number is HD502IJ, it is a Samsung F1 500GB SATA II HDD. Spec Link

First of the 2 I want to install, model number is HD501LJ. It is a Samsung Spinpoint 500GB SATA II HDD. Spec Link

The second of the 2 I want to install, model number is ST380011A. It is a Seagate Barracude 80GB ATA-100(?) HDD. Spec Link

They are all 7200rpm.

 

[Sadamto]

I finally got round to putting my old Hd's in my computer. I'm a bit confounded at the moment. All the programs I have (already) installed on my old Hard Drives don't have shortcuts on my start menu etc, I can get over this, but this adds the problem that I can't uninstall programs the usual way, going to control panel/uninstall programs.

Am I supposed to clean my disks manually, or am I missing something? All I have done is put my 2 old Hard drives into my computer, they are visible in MY COMPUTER and I can access them. I haven't formatted them or anything myself. The only thing that has happened since putting them in is a CHKDSK on Boot.

Am I supposed to do anything to them? I have heard of terms such as master and slave but nothing (windows) has notified me to take any actions as of yet. Has windows configured the hard drives automatically?

I mainly want to know so that I can uninstall windows from both HD's and start freeing space up so I can organize files.

Thanks, Adam.

 

[lihuahellen]

Hello, I recently sold a computer to a mate and have been given it's HD back and also I've scavenged a HD from my older computer and now I want to install these into my current computer. I've never installed more than 1 HD and would like to know what to do. I'm fine with physically installing them but don't know how to set up slave and master etc.

Also, both the HD's have an OS installed, one is XP 32bit and the other is Vista 32bit. I want to uninstall these once they're on my current PC which has windows 7 64bit installed.

So what is the process?

Thanks in advance.

Data can (of course) be copied without issue (music, pictures, documents etc.)
If you intend to 'ghost' (copy) the old drive to the new one, there was no need to install Windows on that drive at all - once formatted you would connect as a 'slave' or secondary master and copy the original 2Gb drive over, then reconnect it as 'master' - - done. "completely reformatted and win 98 was installed on it".
On a different machine? When Windows is installed, only the drivers required for that particular machine are installed - switching the drive to another machine usually means installing a completely different set of drivers (unless the machines are identical).