ok i was thinking about taking the Hard drive out of my old PC and fitting it in my new one to use as a second hard drive.thing is the reason i got the new pc was because the operating system was some how wiped off the HD.is there any point in doing it or could there be something on it that could affect the HD on my new PC

If you want the extra space then go for it. Just remember to set the old drive as slave and the new one to master.

i'm just ordering bits to do a pc build, and this is something i am considering,new hard drive of say 120GIG ,pop this in as master and then put my current 40GIG as slave.is it easy enough to copy over from my 40GIG to the new one?the idea is then to remove the 40 GIG one and just run the 120GIG.

Yes it is Jason, it should come up in My Computer as another hard drive.

Just make sure that the smaller drive is slave and not master.

ok that didnt really go accroding to plan.changed it to a slave stuck it in fitted all the cables and started it up and said there was an ide failure :confused:

You could leave both in. Boot from the 40gb and storage on the bigger one. Only downside is if your 40 is older it might be slower. Either way, if building a new PC you'll need to reinstall your OS as the hardware will be different.

If running a 120gb I'd partition it anyway.

ok that didnt really go accroding to plan.changed it to a slave stuck it in fitted all the cables and started it up and said there was an ide failure :confused:

When you boot up do you see the two drives and your optical (CD/DVD) drive listed in the POST

You should see something along the lines of -

Primary Master IDE model name and size of your HD1

Primary Slave IDE model name and size of your HD2

Secondary Master IDE model name of your optical drive

Secondary Slave IDE depends if anything is connected.

If your new PC is shop bought check that what you think is the master isn't set to CS Cable Select.

Urm - slave/master is NOT a very recommended installation choice these days unless you have optical drives. ATA66..133 uses Cable Select automatically, and if you don't use it you can get corruptions...

I'd be a little cautious

I'm out of date then!!

Always ran mine that way with no problems - what you get used to I suppose.

It can work ok, but ATA66+ is supposed to be cable select only. Most of the time it will be fine, but you might as well do it by the book

Sata is probably different again though, havent used sata much yet :(

SATA - Nice idea but would mean new drives and a PCi card or new M/B. Can't justify it at the moment when (Fingers Crossed) all is well here.

By the time I get round to it there'll be something better I expect!!