Summary: Second hard drives are good for extra storage. Learn how to install second hard drives in this free video on hard drives.
I have been working with computers since my high school days, almost 10 years ago, when I took a Novell Netware 4.11 class. Since then I have built too many computers to count and...read more
"Now I’m going to talk about setting up a hard drive for storage. You already have a second hard drive installed, now you need to set it ready so Windows can read it, and that’s all what I’m going to show. So now, we’re going to talk about setting up hard drive as additional storage. Here’s your motherboard on your computer. You connected the cable and this is your IDE cable right here on the top of the connector. Since we’re going to setup a hard drive in Windows to be used as additional storage, we have the IDE1 hard drive setup as master and we have the second additional hard drive on IDE1 setup with the slave pin. Also, motherboards come with two IDE connectors so you can also add addition hard drive by going with the IDE2. In this case, if you put at the top connector, you need to set it up as a master. If you go with the bottom connector you need to set it up as a slave. Also remember the skinny cables I showed before? Those are the serial ATA’s; with those you don’t need to worry about any pins like you do in the IDE all you do is run the straight cable to the hard drive. So the first thing you need to do once the hard drive is installed, your computer is going to give you some messages of new hardware found and stuff. All you need to do is go to my computer, double click it, and then your new hard drive will show up. It’ll have some other name. Mine, I can name hard drive. What you do is this one’s already in your system remember we’re setting it up for additional storage. All you need to do is right click it. Then right here you’ll see a thing that says format, click that and here’s the capacity. Mine is an 80 gig. Since you’re running Windows XP, you need to put an NTFS. Don’t worry about that. Here’s volume label here you can put your name let’s say drive or something. You can just put your name and then you just click start. Since my drive’s already setup, I don’t want to format. Formatting completely erases all the information on the drive, but since the hard drive was brand new we’re putting it as additional storage. You don’t have to worry about anything because you don’t have anything in the drive anyways. So just connect the hard drive, right click, go to format, click start, and you’re done; your drive will be good to use."