Refurbishing and older PC - hard drive trouble.

[strykr14]

Hello all.

New to the form - I hope you guys can help me out.

I was going to buy a new PC and give my old one to my young (8 and 11) boys for light games and school work but I am stationed overseas for the next 3 years so I thought I would wait. A friend of mine gave me a Dell Dimention 2400 sereis desktop:

Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
Widows XP
80 GB 7200 ATA HD
512K of Ram
48X CD Drive
16X DVD Drive (Not working - wont eject)
3.5 inch floppy drive.
200 W power supply

So I tossed the floppy drive, tossed the CD Rom, replaced the DVD Drive with an 8x I had laying around, bought 2 gigs of Ram (not here yet) and a 320 GB drive.

I have reinstalled XP on the 80 GB drive and I put the new drive in the slot for the old 3.5 inch floppy. I used the cable coming from the motherboard to the DVD drive and then I put it on the new hard drive. The PC is not letting me access the new HD. I checked the boot sequence, it's not there. The device manager sees 2 drives though. Could this be a driver issue (I haven't hooked it up to the internet yet).

Thanks for the help!

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Check the jumpers on the drives first - the one the OS is on should be set to master, the storage drive should be set to slave.

 

[strykr14]

THanks.

That may have been the problem. Unfortunately I tried to connect to the internet and was a no go there as well. Too much trouble - I guess I'll buy myself a PC and give my old one to my boys. One more Pentium 4 bites the dust.

 

[strykr14]

So this thing was in the garage on the way to the trash can this morning. I talked to our IT guy at work and he told me to update the drivers off of the dell site onto a USB stick. I did, and I have internet! So, I was thinking of dumping the original 80 GB Hdrive in favor of the new 320 I have. Would the older drive be worth hanging on to? Leave the OS on it and use the 320 as a 2nd drive? WOuld the older 80 GB drive slow things down?

 

[arsenalbates]

I would keep it and use it as a backup drive. Its not very big but you can put all your files that are large such as video and games. then you have more room on the bigger hard drive.

 

[strykr14]

ok - should I leave the OS on it or put the OS (XP) on the 320?

 

[arsenalbates]

You could use something like acronis true image home to do a clone of your current 80GB to then clone to the 320GB drive. This means that your 320 drive will now have all the stuff the 80 one did.

This may be complicated and could take time so i suggest you use the install DVD to install XP to the 320 drive from fresh and then once your in using the 320 drive format the 80 drive and there you have it !

so in short i would put the OS on the 320