I have installed a second hard drive,can I make this the primary drive (C),by renaming or something.Or do I have to swap the leads over physically?
Thanks.

change the jumper to primary and the IDE cable.

if u have instructions u will see that one drive will be the master, and the other should be set to slave.


depending what OS you are running you can select my computer and MANAGE and this allows you to preform some decent tasks.

Originally posted by matsalleh
I have installed a second hard drive,can I make this the primary drive (C),by renaming or something.Or do I have to swap the leads over physically?
Thanks.
In terms of physically installing the drive so that the new drive was a master you would need to place it on the end socket with your older drive on the middle one.

As mentioned above you also need to make sure that your jumpers (the little 2 pin connector dooberies) on the back of each drive is set accordingly... Cable Select on both should work ok but I usually set them using the master (MA) and slave (SL) setting to be sure.


Once you've done that you'll need to reinstall your operating system or use a disk utility like Norton Ghost / Drive Image to ghost (ie: copy) your old disk across to your new one..

Note: you cannot do a straight file to file copy and expect it to work, a ghosting utility is the only option.


My advice though is to install fresh to your new hard drive and then copy in the files that you want to hang on to from your older drive.

Word of advice on preparation..
1. Rename your disk parititions on the existing drive to old_whatever so you know it's on the older drive when you come to upgrade
2. Burn a ghosted copy of all your essential data BEFORE you do anything.
3. Leave a whole 4 hours to complete the process and if you get impatient, go cool off and return to it.. don't crack on when it's all going wrong and frustrating you... It never works out.

Thanks Folks,
All I need now is the time and courage to do it.