HDD HELP please

[Bocephus]

I currently have a 160 GB HDD that i am using a SATA dongle on it (just to get rid of the fugly ribbon cable). There is a jumper selection for master and slave and such. On the HDD is Windows XP, MS office 2000 and some mmo games.

I was given a Hitachi Deskstar 500GB SATA 3Gb/s HDD that i got out of a Hewlett Crappard. There are no jumpers on this HDD and it has both SATA power and legacy power. With a warning that says connecting both SATA power and legacy power may cause unpredictable results. This HDD has Vista on it and dont know what else because i cant get it to boot (it had both SATA and legacy power connected). I want to install it on my ASUS M4N68T-M V2 Mobo, erase whats on it and transfer my MMO games and MS office to it from the XP HDD and then use it with another HDD that has win 7 on it.

But like i said there arent any jumpers to select for slave or anything else for that matter.

Can you guys tell me how to do this please?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Im on a fixed income and dont have anything bigger than a 2 GB thumb drive X(

 

[Master&Puppet]

Modern HDDs often don't come with jumpers and the drive priority is set in bios instead. I'm not sure if your Mobo is capable of this but check out the HDD's label or find the manufacturer's webpage for guidance on setting priority with jumpers.

If this doesn't work then I'd suggest you download Ubuntu onto a CD and run it from the CD. Navigate to gparted and format the HDD from there.

You will struggle to get an operating system to work when it has been installed on a separate motherboard. You will need to do a fresh OS install to get it working properly and easily.

When you say "transferring MMOs" do you mean you are going to copy and paste across? You will need to reinstall to get it working without registry fixes.

 

[Bocephus]

thanks for your help. Something you said made me think of doing a google search for formating a secondary HDD in win XP and found this very helpful http://lifehacker.com/157578/geek-t...ard-drive-and-install-windows-xp-from-scratch and it worked perfectly. I ended up not needing ubuntu at all. I just hooked the hitachi HDD up like I would if it was the only HDD, booted to BIOS and there they both were. BIOS still showed my original HDD as primary boot SATA1, CD secondary boot SATA2 and Hitachi as SATA boot3...

tyvm master&puppet

Now for two more noob questions...
1. I have never needed or had to install more than 1 HDD on a single computer...should they be in
a raid array or just left alone...im not using this for a server, its just my desk top PC which i
will be transferring files and programs back and forth?

2. What is the easiest and best method to transfer these files and programs?

 

[Bocephus]

Modern HDDs often don't come with jumpers and the drive priority is set in bios instead. I'm not sure if your Mobo is capable of this but check out the HDD's label or find the manufacturer's webpage for guidance on setting priority with jumpers.

If this doesn't work then I'd suggest you download Ubuntu onto a CD and run it from the CD. Navigate to gparted and format the HDD from there.

You will struggle to get an operating system to work when it has been installed on a separate motherboard. You will need to do a fresh OS install to get it working properly and easily.

When you say "transferring MMOs" do you mean you are going to copy and paste across? You will need to reinstall to get it working without registry fixes.

I am not putting an Os on the Hitachi HDD...just using for mass storage of files / programs and PC games

 

[Bocephus]

thanks for all your help both in the thread and PM's.
So far this is taken care of

ty