Installing a second hard drive

[News]

This is a follow up to all sorts of other questions and queries.

Still playing with two PCs, old running XP and newer running W7. Decided to move the HD from the XP machine to the W7 machine, to ease transfer of old docts etc., and give extra storage capacity. Problem. It seems that the old PC uses an IDE connector, whereas the new PC uses what I think is SATA.

The old HD (Seagate Barracuda) uses a 40 pin connector, with a ribbon cable to the board, via a second (unused) 40 pin connector for a second drive.

The W7 HD connector is completely different and appears not to have a 'spare' connector for a slave drive.

Am I wasting my time trying to marry one to the other?

[mick]

Some SATA motherboards do have an IDE connector as well. If you can't find one then you can find IDE to SATA adaptors (a little PCB with connectors & an IC) for quite reasonable prices. Just plug and go. :)

[GB]

There's probably more than one SARA connector on the motherboard.

You'll need an IDE to SATA convertor plus a SATA cable. Simpler is to stick the drive into one of those USB caddies, but these are slow.

If you want to save money, start both PCs up and join them with a network cable. You really ought to use a crossover cable, but I bet an ordinary patch cable will work. That's what I would do.

[GB]

[Mike Humphrey]

SATA uses one cable per drive - most motherboards have at least four ports. There's no way to directly connect an ATA drive to a SATA controller. Some boards have both types of controller, but that's not common on very recent machines which tend to only have SATA. If you have got an ATA connector on the new machine you can move the drive over without a problem. Otherwise the best option is probably an external drive case that connects to USB.

Mike

[John Williamson]

Or go to your local computer fair or Maplin store and buy an IDE to SATA adaptor. The one I bought for a tenner or so works either way round, so you can use it to plug a SATA drive into an old motherboard or an IDE drive into a new one. You'll also need the appropriate cables and a SATA to IDE power adaptor. Once you've plugged it all together, it's pretty much plug and pray, with the only real problem being to get Windows to see the new (old) drive, which will probably require an excursion into Disk Manager.

[John Rumm]

Yup, IDE supports two devices per bus: master and slave.

SATA supports one per bus. However most motherboards have at least 4 and often 6 or more SATA ports.

Not necessarily. You can get IDE to SATA adaptors (make sure you get the right one - they do ones for using SATA devices on IDE buses and also IDE devices on SATA).

However, if all you want is a temporary lashup for quick file transfer, one of the USB to IDE+SATA adaptors is often the easiest way of grafting any type of drive onto a machine temporarily. About a fiver from ebay.

[newshound]

Or eBay

Here is the power connector

and here is a data one

or this one

But an external USB box gives you more flexibility, because you can always hook it up to a laptop or tablet too.

I think it is well worth having one of these in your spares kit if you might end up doing this again

as it is the quick and easy way to look at any "loose" hard (or optical) drive. This one includes a power supply which is a bit more flexible than one powered by USB since that doesn't always give enough current for older drives.

[Rick Hughes]

SATA to IDE adapter cables are cheap and plug direct onto IDE drive.

[John Rumm]

(and many other examples)

[SteveW]

A large number of them seem to be bi-directional and can be used for either.

SteveW

[News]

In message , newshound writes

Thanks for *all* the replies. I have ordered the kit above, partly because I have a drawer full of old hard drives, and it will be handy to use the kit, to see if there is anything of interest there.

The kit will either come with full instructions, or connections will be obvious, or I'll be back in a few days :-)

[Mark]

That one come with some unique Specifications :(

-

[The Natural Philosopher]

Reminds me of that urban legend about a man who won an Apple competion for the most creative thing you could do with an Apple Mac....

"With additional hardware, and software, an Apple Mac could land a man on Mars"

It all depends on what you mean by 'directly connect' doesn't it?

[Sam Plusnet]

As in "Let's ignore the fact that these words were used"?

[News]

In message , newshound writes

The above kit was ordered and duly arrived. No instructions but all connections were fairly obvious. Happy bunny - can now access the old hard drive as well as the new. Thank you!

However, the old (IDE) drive is exactly as I removed it from the old PC, complete with XP. How can I tell the new PC to boot XP rather than W7, or is that not possible? I have been pressing F keys during boot, and can set boot from floppy, CD or hard drive, but the only hard drive option is the original, which boots W7.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Download a free prog called Easy BCD. That will allow you to access the dual boot function easily. You'll then get the choice of booting either Win7 or XP just after the BIOS page shows - and also be able to decide which one is the default if you don't actually select one.

[John Rumm]

Your first possible problem is that not all BIOSes will boot from an external hard drive...

The next is that the old drive will have a boot.ini file that directs the windows boot loader to a numbered partition on a numbered interface

- thse will almost certainly be wrong for the new setup - so you will need to edit that (you can turn on the boot menu in it, and also add multiple entries with different partition numbers etc and try each until you find the right one).

Ideally you would need to clone the old XP to the new disk, then do a win7 install onto that so that it can be setup as a multiboot system. That will give you an early boot menu to choose win7 or "earlier" OS using the normal windows boot loader.

[News]

Thanks to Dave and John for the comments. I duly installed Easy BCD, but it does not work for my situation, despite me letting it find the drive, then retrying manually. I suspect the problem is as outlined by John.

I'm not brave enough to start playing with boot loaders and the like, so will accept that I cannot do what I thought I may be able to. Not a huge problem, as I have already copied the data, and if I really need to boot the XP disk, I can pop it back in the PC it came from.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I've sometimes found you have to get Easy BCD to add an extra entry. If say Win 7 is the main one and XP the extra, changed the XP entry name to say XP2 or whatever and get it add a new one for XP. If that new one now works change the non working one's name to rubbish or whatever and just ignore it. ;-)

I have no idea why I've had to do this - but it worked on at least two machines.