I have an old 486 running Windows 95 and I need to add a second harddrive to it. I have an old internal 540mB harddrive and at the moment all I have done is plug it into the power supply and the cable that is plugged into the first harddrive. What settings do I need to change in order for the computer to recognise this new harddrive?
Cheers
Pushkin
a) the two drives are sharing a cable, so one of them needs to be configured as a “slave” drive. There’ll be a set of jumpers between the IDE cable and the power cable on the back of the drive, hopefully with labels. It’s likely that the old drive will currently be configured as a “master” drive, and so a jumper will have to be moved. If the jumpers aren’t labelled, tell us what sort of drive it is (make, model, etc.)
b) the bios needs to know about the drive. On boot-up, hit <delete> or whatever combination of keys gets you into the set-up screen. Get the bios to auto-detect hard drives.
If you can give us the model of the HDs we could look them up? You’d probably have to take both out, set the old one to master & the new one to slave. I know it was said above but some drives have a setting
for single drive systems.
Back in the 486 days, hard drives tended to have three settings, standalone, master, and slave. These days most drives only have two, combining standalone and master. I’ve also never seen a 486 with two IDE ports, so you will have to make them master and slave on the same cable. You’ll have to look up the jumper settings for the drive from the manufacturer. Most of them back then weren’t very obvious. Make the old one (with your OS, etc) the master, and the new one the slave. As Desmostylus said, the next step is to simply go into the bios and let it know the drive exists. Most 486 computers will have an option to autodetect the drive, but you may have to manually enter the parameters if it doesn’t. The drive parameters may be written on the drive. If not then you can get them from the same place where you get the jumper settings (from the manufacturer’s web page).
Some software records the install path for the CD when it goes onto the hard drive. Win95 by default will make your CD drive D if you only have one partition on one drive. With a second disk drive, win95 assigns drive letters to hard disks first, so the new drive will become D and the CD will change to E. Whenever win95 and other software that records the install path asks for a disk, it will be looking in the wrong place for it. Win95 just gives you an annoying message about not being able to find the files, and you just point it to the new drive. Some of your other software may need to be re-installed. Sometimes it’s just a registry key, so if you can figure it out you can change it without re-installing the software. The usual warnings about registry hacks apply of course.
Whoops, hit send too early.
The new drive will have to be partitioned and formatted, if it hasn’t already been done so. Use FDISK to partition it, and FORMAT to format it. When using FDISK, be VERY CAREFUL to make sure you select the second drive. You don’t want to muck up the partition table on your existing drive.
The jumper settings of master/slave/single are brand specific. Some distinguish between master and single, others don’t. Vintage isn’t the issue. There are certain combinations of drives by different makers that won’t work together at all no matter what jumper settings you try. That’s the Wonderful World of Non-standard PC hardware for you.
Go the the web sites of the HD makers, search for your models, get the lowdown on the right jumper setting. Keep in mind that there could be info on the cover of the drive too, but for some strange reason I find that they typically don’t label which pins are 1-2, etc. on the drive very well, if at all.
Many old HD makers have been bought out. So you might get redirected to the current owner’s site.
Thanks for the help people, there were some settings for jumpers on the HD itself which I changed so that it was the slave, are any changes to the motherboard needed? I saw that this will make my new HD the D: as well, will it simply reassign my CD to E: or will new installations or running CDs get any more complicated?
I hope this is as complex as it gets though as I will have to talk my Dad through this on the phone cos I won’t be back home till Saturday 
"These days most drives only have two, combining standalone and master. "
Ah, don’t forget CS, cable select.
I don’t see any mention of changing the existing drive’s jumpers to be master. Did you do this?
Win95 will automatically move your CD to the next available letter (probably E, unless the new HD is partitioned into multiple drives). Whenever you change part of the system, win95 will ask you to put the original win95 disk in drive D, but since you have a hard drive at D now all you will have to do is click on the option to browse to whatever file it is looking for and point it to the E drive. It’s kind of a pain, but fortunately win95 doesn’t ask you for its disk very often.
Other than that, it depends on your software. A lot of programs will look for their CD in any available CD drive. Some software will have its install path hard coded somewhere, and will insist on you putting the CD in drive D before it will continue. These programs may need to be re-installed to run properly.
On average, expect very few problems.
Damn! I hate that.