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Grex Micros Item 185: Adding a second hard drive.
Entered by gibson on Fri Mar 27 06:36:22 UTC 1998:

        My 486 only has 100meg of hard drive but a friend gave me a 386 with
a 400 meg in it with software he no longer uses. Can i add it to my 486 and
reletter it E drive without losing whats on it?

12 responses total.

#1 of 12 by omni on Sat Mar 28 07:19:23 1998:

  Why not take the smaller one out, and make it the primary drive? 

  If that was the primary drive in the 386, it should boot the machine.

  This is just a suggestion.

#2 of 12 by davel on Sat Mar 28 12:47:50 1998:

Because 500 is better than 400?

#3 of 12 by gibson on Sat Mar 28 23:02:12 1998:

        I want the extra  100m but it doesnt matter which is primary.
I also don't want to transfer the data if i don't have to.

#4 of 12 by dang on Sun Mar 29 19:19:31 1998:

The answer is yes.  You can add the harddrive as either primary or secondary
and use both.  One will be drive C and one will be drive D.  If you have a
CD-ROM, you will probably want it to become E, because there are problems with
hard-drives on the secondary IDE that CD-ROM's don't have.  It's a bit
complicated the first time, and of course is different on different computers,
but basically you open the computer up, jumper one drive as master and the
other as slave, plug them in with master on the cable closer to the end
connected to the motherboard, turn the computer on, and configure the bios
to use them.  After that everything works fine.  I've done it hundreds of
times.

#5 of 12 by gibson on Tue Mar 31 04:32:42 1998:

        Thanks, That was my guess but I didn't want to do it without a second
opinion. But I currently have stacker using D drive, that won't matter will
it ?

#6 of 12 by dang on Tue Mar 31 22:15:36 1998:

Nope.  The stacker will have to reletter, because the letter D gets assigned
to the harddrive by the hardware at boot time long before the stacker is
loaded.  If you have the letter assigned in a config file, you'll need to
change it before you shutdown to change drives.  If it's figured out at load
time, then you shouldn't have to do anything.

#7 of 12 by gibson on Thu Apr 2 03:57:55 1998:

        Okay, next step, backup (sigh).

#8 of 12 by gibson on Tue Apr 28 04:34:48 1998:

        So far, no luck. When you say jumper them master and slave do you mean
there should be jumpers on the card? I've wired them in but get messages like
C:\ drive failure D:\ drive failure or HDD failure or Fdd failure. They both
work fine alone.
        I've also tried changing the .bat, .sys, and .ini listings so that any
references to C:\ on the slave are D:\.
        If it comes down to it, how can I transfer the data from the 100M from
modem to modem directly?

#9 of 12 by scott on Tue Apr 28 11:01:52 1998:

Jumpers on the drives themselves.

#10 of 12 by dang on Wed Apr 29 01:23:26 1998:

exactly.  There is a jumper on the harddrive (Incedentally, all but one of
my drives has that jumpsr as J20.) There is usually a sticker on the drive
telling you which configurations are master and which are slave.  The drive
on the wire closest to the card needs to be jumpered master, and the drive
furthest from the card slave.

#11 of 12 by mwg on Tue May 5 16:03:39 1998:

In theory, there are positions on the cable for master and slave, in
practice, I've never found it to matter.  I've even had to wire some
systems with the motherboard or controller on the middle connector and a
drive on each end.

#12 of 12 by dang on Tue May 12 18:40:24 1998:

On my computer, the positions of the drives on the cables matters.  I'd do
it right, just in case.  (Actually, on all 3 of my computers it matters.)

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