how should I set up my PC for a new hard drive

[trashcop]

I recently got a 40gb hard drive. I know that it is in working condition because I saw it running when it was taken out of another computer. Right now it has WinME on it. It is a Western Digital WD400.
Here is what I have right now...

10gb WD 102aa harddrive running on my primary IDE with Windows XP.
Cd Rom on secondary as master
Cd RW on secondary as slave

How should I set it up for me to be able to get into my windows XP and use partition magic to delete everything off of the 40gig so I can use it for storage. I tried a few settings but everytime I turned the PC on it would say searching for slave or master HDD. Thanks for any help.

 

[wannabe_hacker]

on the jumper settings on the hard drive, did you set the 40gb drive to slave? I don't totally understand what your saying, sorry. From what I understand, you want to run your 10gb hard drive w/ XP and then erase everything (format) from the other while both are connected.

If so, you need to set the second drive to slave by configuring the jumper settings on the drive itself. Once you do that your computer should recognize both drives and then you can format the slave drive.

If I am way off and this didn't help at all, then I'm sorry I couldn't help. But there are plenty of others here who know what to do! Good Luck!

 

[NoodleKnight]

Hi,
I would take the 40gb hard drive (the storage one), plug only that one that one in, make sure the jumper is on master, then boot with a Windows ME, 98 or any relative version, Boot Disk. Then do a minimal boot, or whatever its called depending on the boot disk version. That should get you into DOS. From there run FDISK, which is just like partition magic, except it can only delete and create partitions for Windows. Once you create the new partitions format the drive ("format <drive letter>" is the command, if you didn't know), then when its all done, plug in the other drive, make sure that it's jumper is on master, and switch the other on slave. Then you should be able to boot the O/S on your new hard drive, and Windows should see the second drive, also might prompt you that it found some new hardware, but all in all it should work.

 

[Apokalipse]

you can set the 40 gig as slave, the 10 gig as master, and it should boot off the 10 gig
then when you're in Windows, go to my computer and, you should see your 40 gig there. right click it and click format
use FAT32 for Windows ME

 

[trashcop]

I just tried setting the 40gig to slave and the 10 gig to master. When I started up my PC it said detecting HDD Primary Slave, it just did nothing and didn't detect it. Then I tried running the 40 gig alone as master and it still wouldn't detect the drive.
Is this PC just too old to recognize this drive? It is an old PII 400mhz.

 

[wannabe_hacker]

I just recently put a second HD in my comp.
You might want to take a look at this.
http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21065
I was having a problem setting up a slave and this post explains what to do.