3 QUESTIONS ABOUT ADDING A 2 HARD DRIVE

1) you'll need whatever tool to open your case be it phillips screw driver or hex head wrench or just fingers on the keyless case openings. A hard disk, possibly a dual controller ribbon cable, a grounding wrist strap is nice to help prevent a static discharge hurting your system, otherwise make sure you touch the metal portions of the chasis to try and at least get your static level the same as the pc. You may need a stronger power supply or a power splitter cable to get enough power connections. Normally the drive will come with all the hardware you need (screws, dual connector cable) follow the instructions for the drive with how your drives jumper pins should be set and adjust your other drive as well if on the same cable. One master, one slave. Then you need to partition the drive with fdisk to create the primary and any secondary partitions and then format the drive partitions you created with fdisk.
2) wher you put or find things is up to you, you can either copy in a command window or use explorer. The operating system can be loaded on either drive. Just run setup from the operating system disk. (what operating system NT?98?xp?)
If you put each drive ina two drive system on it's own controller then it will be at it's fastest, just watch the master/slave settings with cd/dvdrom combinations. Normally I'ld start by making backups in case anything goes awry. That way at the least you'll just have to reinstall everything where you want it and then reload your data. A lot of software may need uninstalling and reinstalling if you go to a 2 drive system just to get their mappings right so again when installing a new drive, it's agood to to start clean. A common thing to do with windows is create the swapfile on the second drive to increase speeds, just be careful if you do, it's something you want to do only when the computer is at it's final state.

1. Depends a lot on system and drive.
Many older motherboards do not support the new large hard drives.
If this is true for your system, you may be able to use the utilities from the drive mfg, or you may want to add a PCI IDE controller card.

You need to check the jumper settings on both drives to verify that your present boot drive is set to master with slave present, and the new drive is set to slave.

If you are not using the drive mfgs utilities (I only use them when absolutely necessary) you need to run fdisk to partition the new drive.
There are a lot of good information links at www.fdisk.com/fdisk
Another source for good information on fdisk and partitions is www.aumha.org

MAKE SURE THAT YOU HAVE THE CORRECT DRIVE SELECTED!

If your present drive has 2 or more partitions, you may want to set up the new drive as an extended DOS partition, and define logical drives.
This way, your existing D: drive will stay the D: drive.

2. You can easily move DATA files using Windows Explorer.
Right click when you drag, and select move or you will simply copy the files.
In most software packages, you can set the default path to open and save files.

3. You CANNOT simply move Windows or any APPLICATION software to the new drive.
You will need to uninstall it from the current drive, and re-install it onto the new drive.

To even copy Windows for a backup, you will need to boot into DOS as some files cannot be copied or moved when Windows is running.

Chas

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