Adding a new old hard drive

[DrFaroohk]

Here's a good one: You have two computers. Computer A is all but useless. It runs windows xp. You take the hard drive out of it, and put it in Computer B to use as a secondary hard drive. Computer B uses Windows 2000.

Could that cause any problems?

[Der Cute]

Mostly no, but possibly yes.

If the 2 hard drives are IDE (big wide ribbon with gray cabling), you need to check and make sure who's master and who's slave.

Put the W2K one as master, and XP as slave. To do so, you change the jumper pins on the ass end of the drive.

Like this: [ : : : I:I ] for the jumpers. Read the super fine print on the drives themselves. It may be on the board side of the drive.

Put W2K drive at LAST SPOT ON CABLE (master) and make it master with the pins.

Put XP drive at middle of cable (slave) and make it slave with pins.

Or put pins at CableSelect CS and let the cable itself do the picking. I am suggesting the Pin selection AND the Cable placement, since I assume your PC is older than 5 or 6 years (with the OS being W2K).

Make sure the BIOS can read large hard drives (when was your last BIOS update?)


Plug it in as I say, darnit :P and then boot 'er up. If you have another HD under W2K, you're as good as gold.

This will NOT have a dual boot system on it.


Cutenoob

[DrFaroohk]

Said hard drive also runs kinda crappy. I've gotten the files I wanted from it, now it'd just be nice to have lots of extra storage. I try to format it and it says it can't because something is still using the drive, like a utility or a window is open that displays the drive, but nothing is running that's on that drive!

[Der Cute]

Couple of options.
First off, tell me *HOW* you are attempting to reformat the new additional disk.
Step by step, please.

[MrSmiley]

Said hard drive also runs kinda crappy. I've gotten the files I wanted from it, now it'd just be nice to have lots of extra storage. I try to format it and it says it can't because something is still using the drive, like a utility or a window is open that displays the drive, but nothing is running that's on that drive!

With Windows 2000 and WindowsXP it might be easier to unmount the drive, which essentially "erases" it's drive letter on the system.

1. START MENU > RUN > CMD > "mountvol x: /d" (replace X with the drive's letter) (may require a reboot).
2. After it's no longer holding on to a drive letter, you should be able to go to START MENU > CONTROL PANEL > ADMINISTRATOR TOOLS > COMPUTER MANAGEMENT > DISK MANAGER and format, repartition or do whatever other functions you want onto it. If you delete the partition, your drive will essentially be unformatted and other non-Windows OSes can use it to setup.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Why am I making things more complicated? I think you can unmount the drive from that same DISK MANAGER screen... so don't even bother with the "cmd" I guess

[Fire_on_High]

You can. 2k's still a fine old workhorse if you don't need features you can only get in the latest.