I'm trying to put my old HD into my new PC as a 2nd drive but the connections are different. I took some pictures so it would be easier to see. Any help would be appreciated.
Hi, That connector there is a SATA power connector. Check to see if you have any 4 Pin Molex connectors free (the same as the ones used on your CD drive) as your Hard Drive uses them instead of the SATA power connectors. Dave
Ok I do have a 2nd set of the ones you mentioned. I had a 2nd DVD Burner but I decided to get rid of it. Would I use both the connections to hook the HD up? How do I configure it to make sure it works OK?
First, you need to find out if your DVD Burner was a master or slave drive. If it was plugged into the connector closest to the motherboard then it was a slave drive or the one on the end of the cable would be master. Now you need to set the jumpers on the back of the Hard Drive to master or slave (same as what your DVD Burner used to be). There may be a diagram on the top showing you the correct jumper positions. Then it’s simply a case of screwing or clipping the drive in for people with fancy cases. Then connect the cables that used to be in the back of your DVD Burner. There may be a thin cable connected to your sound card. Just leave this out or plug in into your other DVD Drive. Dave
Ok I went and did the connects and it worked fine. I was able to access the old HD's data and such with no problem. I shut down and rearrange the burner and HD so the cables were closer. When I started back up and tried to access the HD it said it needed to be formatted. And it only gave a capacity option of 7GB and it's a 120GB HD. Why'd it do that all of a sudden?
OK. What I was thinking is that you had two partitions and you were trying to access one that is not formatted. A partition is where you can split a Hard Drive into pieces.
Well it looks like it's working. I rebooted twice just to make sure. THANKS A MILLION MAN! One other question though. Well maybe a few. Sorry. First off, the newly installed HD has some programs installed on it, I was wondering if I'd be able to use them? I guess I could try first. Second, I just reformatted my PC and have installed a few essential programs. I was wondering if I copied the folders to the 2nd HD if I could use them still? I'm just trying to save all my data onto the new HD so if I need to reformat in the future I won't lose anything b/c I lost a good bit when I reformatted yesterday.
With your first question, maybe. It's just a case of trying and finding out. It depends weather it needs to use the registry or not. Second question, again maybe. But, more likely it will work than what you want to do in your first question. Dave
Ok my last question. I promise. If I delete EVERYTHING off the old HD will it cause any problems on my PC? All the info was obviously for my old computer. I just want the HD to be able to store pictures, music, etc.
Scratch that last post. I found out that it didn't matter. But I am noticing something rather peculiar. I had a lot of MP3s on that HD which is one of the main reasons I wanted to get it installed. I'm noticing that every now and then the MP3 I'm playing will have a lot of "cracking" sounds. Kinda like playing on a record and sometimes it even skips. If I change the song, it keeps doing it until I restart iTunes. I'm just wondering if it's b/c they've been sitting on the HD unused for so long or if it's b/c they're from another computer and have some kinda memory in them from the old PC. If that makes any sense. Also it seems like the data on the drive sometimes run rather slow. For example I've been tagging the songs with a program called TagScanner. I've always used it. For years. Before I would tag with album art and it would save the tag with no problem. Now if I save a tag with album art on any of the MP3s on the "new" HD it takes like 20 seconds to save and if I have music playing, that's when the cracking starts. Never happened before. I know I type out a HUGE bit. I'm sorry. I just wanna make sure everything is kosher.
Ok so I did a little test. I took an album. Sent it to my original "C" drive and tag it. No lag, no problems. Sent them back to the new HD and did it again. It lagged and my mouse was moving very choppy. I'm wondering do I need to format the drive? It's a 120GB drive but on my PC it says it only has 111GB.
No, should cause no problems. I recommend reformatting it as NTFS. Go to My Computer, Right Click on it and select Format. Then Enter the Volume Label you Want and Select NTFS from the drop down menu. With that done, Hit Start.
Formatted Compacaty will always be less. Try reformatting. Just make sure you back everything up. Look at my instructions in the previous post. PS: Before you do try Defragmenting it, especially if its formatted as FAT32.
Looks like defragging didn't help. I'm going to format that drive and see. Just gotta save the data first.
Still no luck. I've done everything from reformatting/defragging. Still has the "skipping/lag" issue in general. I'm gonna try to the DiscWizard from Seagate and see what happens.
