PC Hard Drives: Jump What? Where?

Factual Questions
1
      • I bought another hard drive today, and I can’t get it to do sheet. I want to install it as the primary and leave the original as a slave. It didn’t come with a jumper included, but I assume one is necessary anytime you have two drives. The guy at the store didn’t say that, and the instructions seem to imply you don’t, but mine won’t do jack with both drives empty. - The floppy that came with it isn’t much help: the on-screen instructions don’t match the printed instructions, and neither is accurate to what the machine (Win98) does. I assume the order of business is this:
        1.Install new drive as slave, fdisk/surface.
        2.Diskcopy all of C’s contents onto the new drive.
        3.Reboot into BIOS and swap the settings between the hard drives.(Which key does this in Win98? The books I got are for 95 and the computer doesn’t say during startup)
        4.Reboot again (now it should start on the new drive with the copied files), and reformat the old drive.
        Am I missing anything? - MC
2

First, the BIOS key depends on your motherboard, not the OS. Check the manuals that came with your computer for the BIOS key.

Secondly, the instructions that came with the drive should have a diagram of where to put a jumper or throw a switch to make it slave. Note that it doesn’t particularly matter whether it is slave or master. If it doesn’t have the jumper you need, go to a computer parts store and buy a bag of them.

3

What type of drive? Who made it? What model number? Don’t like to beg, but there are thousands of them.

4

Before you do all that I suggest that you switch the drives’ positions on the cable. Usually there is a jumper position for ‘cable select’ and I think it may be the default if there are no jumpers. I also think, but I’m not sure, that the position on the cable closest to the motherboard is the master. When you are in the BIOS (ditto on what Friedo said. It’s not the operating system, it’s the motherboard, so usually its either del, F1, esc, or F5. Those are the only ones that I know.)

5

That last line should have read like this:

When you are in the BIOS (ditto on what Friedo said. It’s not the operating system, it’s the motherboard, so usually its either del, F1, esc, or F5. Those are the only ones that I know.) , check and see if you can mess with the drive settings from there.

My apologies.

6

You need a special cable to use the cable select option. The cable select cable has a twist in it, like a floppy cable. The cable select option is almost never used.

7
      • I tried switching the positions on the cable. For CD drives switching the positions switches the letters, but it don’t work for HD’s, at least on mine. - MC
8
      • Also I’m not at home right now so I don’t know the model number but the Seagate page for the model says that if it isn’t the master drive, it has to have a jumper. - MC
9

Depending on the old drive, it may need a jumper to define it as a master instead of a single drive (Western Digital drives are like this - no jumper means that it is a single drive, one jumper setting means master, jumper on second set of pins means slave).

I don’t think diskcopy will do it. You might be able to shortcut by installing the system with a FORMAT command, but I really doubt it.

You could use a product called DriveCopy. It’s a fairly inexpensive tool that can copy the complete drive image to a new, larger drive.

Beyond that, what I would recommend is to install the OS from your original media (diskette or CDR), especially if it is a MS operating system (W95/W98/NT/W2k/WME). MS systems need too much stuff in the right place and have too many hidden files to just copy the files over.

Either way, changing settings in the BIOS won’t be enough when you switch the drives around, you’ll have to change the jumper settings on both drives to make the old slave the new master and the old master the new slave. If the cable is straight-through without any twists in it, the “cable select” option won’t work, and it doesn’t matter what position the drives are in on the cable.

10

The slave MUST be marked as a slave with the jumper. Without jumpers on either drive, both will attempt to become the master drive, and they will not boot. Find a jumper, and set the drive you want to be the slave to be slave. Older drives might need a jumper to be set to designate it as a master, but not most drives today. Also, be aware that the master drive will be treated as the boot drive unless you change the BIOS settings…even then you might not be able to boot off the slave. Anyway, I’ve got 2 controllers in my system…so I have 4 masters and only 1 slave. :slight_smile:

Jman

11

Try changing the jumper settings on your OLD drive–with most IDE’s, the jumpers are a bank of pins right next to the cable connection. If it works, it should matter how the new drive is configured because the BIOS will recognize the old drive as the slave.

Most motherboards have two places to put the IDE connector cable. If you have just your hard drive and a CD-ROM (or CD-RW, DVD, etc. It doesn’t matter, really, just as long as you have only ONE removable storage device,) there’s a good chance that the second IDE port on your motherboard is empty. What you could do then is configure the old drive as slave and connect it to the second (empty) IDE controller on the motherboard. This would physically free up the space for the new drive. Depending on your BIOS you might have to tell the computer you did that, but if your board is fairly new it should recognize the settings automatically.

12

Right, DOS diskcopy only works on floppy disks.

You can use xcopy to copy between two drives. Start Windows with your original drive as C:, and your new drive as D:

Choose Start, Run, and type
xcopy c:\ d:\ /s /e /h /k /r /c

13

There’s also some caveats to using xcopy. See
http://home.att.net/~navasgrp/tech/clone_copy.htm

14

Eh? One IDE controller can control one master and one slave, so how do you get four masters? Unless you have two of those neato two-controller-on-one-card thingies.

15
      • Well nuts. This was supposed to be easy. ~ The only things I had downloaded (that I can’t reinstall from CD’s) were Netscape, a Win98 update or two and a couple game patches. Looks like I’ll just be using the 20 for now alone, and if I left anything real important on the other I can deal with that later. Wish me karma!
        ~
        (By the by, I just love how it says repeatedly to “back up your hard drive before attempting install/copy”. Back it up to what? Am I supposed to run down to Wal-mart and buy 380 floppy disks? - MC
16

Probably either tape backup or make a Ghost copy of the drive.

17
      • It works! It’s a miracle! -I just left the old drive as it is, unconnected and with everything old still on it. Interestingly enough, as I had read it, the Seagate website info [model ST320413A, for the reeally bored] said that all the jumpers had to be removed for this to be the main drive. I hooked it up alone and did the reformat thing, and then noticed there appear to be two jumpers already there, but I wasn’t gonna pull them out as it was formatting. (They look like two tiny plastic clips with metal “bridges” inside that contact two pins each, if that’s what jumpers are) The thing boots and seems to run normal with them there, so I thinks I’ll leave them for the moment. - MC
18

Terminoligy issues here: Nowadays a controller usually has 2 IDE channels, of which each channel can support 2 devices. Some people consider each channel a controller…I was using the other definition. I have the 2 on-board IDE channels (controllers), plus an extra 2 channel controller card, giving me 4 IDE channels, capable of supporting 8 IDE devices. Sorry about the confusion.

Jman

19
      • I did find how to get into the BIOS setup, but nothing seems to say what kinda motherboard I got. I looked on it and it has a part number, but no brand-name. The Acer site doesn’t give any way to find out, either. The PC is ~3 yrs old. Is there any reference online where I can find out? - MC