help with secondary hard drive please

[tam30over]

hi i hope someone can help with this i am running fat 32 withxp home 120gig harddrive i download quite a lot of things and use winrar to extract some times it tells me when trying to unpack that fat32 only takes up to 4 gig instead of reformating i have a 17gig hard drive lying doing nothing i was wondering if i can add this as a secondary drive on ntfs format while running my main drive as fat 32 so i could direct my unpacking of larger files to that drive, will this cause problems if not can someone tell me how to go about adding it its a seagate 17gig thans for any help

[Van Nugent]

Yep, just format the 17GB drive in NTFS.

[tam30over]

can you tell me how to go about doing it neebs

[Van Nugent]

First, set the jumper on the 17GB drive to slave then connect it to the same IDE cable that you use to connect the main HD to the mobo. Next, go to the BIOS and set all IDE channels to Auto Detect. If everything is correct (cables, jumper, BIOS settings), it should show up at POST when you boot the system up. After Windows loads, it will offer to format the HD if it's not already formatted or you can right click on the drive in Windows Explorer and select Format to format the drive. Remember to choose NTFS when formatting the drive.

[tam30over]

cheers mate i will try that the morn had a few drinks tonight thanks very much for your fast response

btw my friend wants to format his drive and put a new operating system in xp from windows 98 could i do it for him using the same procedure as you told me take his drive out put it in mine format then put back in his and add operating system

[Van Nugent]

If you boot from the XP CD to install WinXP, the setup will give you the option to format the HD in NTFS. You do not need to take the HD off.

[tam30over]

cheers mate will tell him that save alot of mucking about

[tam30over]

hi just had a quick check in my bios and couldnt find auto detect how do i enable this so that i can add my secondary drive i restarted my comp held down delete took me in and i searched couldnt find auto detect

[Van Nugent]

In Standard CMOS BIOS Setup screen, check the IDE Primary/Secondary Master/Slave items. Set them to Auto if they're not.

[PhilEnfield]

As a matter of interest you can also convert your Primary drive to NTFS, without reformatting.

For example: by opening a Command Prompt & typing .... convert C: /fs:ntfs ... this would change the format of drive C: to ntfs format, without losing any data.

[tam30over]

ive checked that out before is it not alot of mucking about pc is running good just now thought it would be easyer to add another drive ( i dont know alot about comps as you can see dos and things is like french was rubbish at school is it that easy just a command you would have to talk me through it when u have time

[Van Nugent]

Even though WinXP's CONVERT command will create much better NTFS partitions performance-wise than the one on Win2K, for the best performance and cluster size formatting, it's still better to do a fresh NTFS format for the drive, not going thru the CONVERT route. So just wait till the next time when you want to reformat the HD to re-install the OS. The thing is NTFS will work better (than FAT32) with NT-based Windows family, which includes Win2K/XP/2K3. It will provide better security and stability and less file/storage problems.

However, in case you need to do the conversion, just open Windows Help then search for help on Convert. It will show you all that you'll need to do.

[tam30over]

i went to add another drive but im needing to get hold of another cable so i can link it up all the connections are being used at the moment so i tryed to do it through command prompt and maybe add drive later when i went and typed convertc:/fs:ntfs
it said the type of the file system is fat32 enter current volume label for drive c: what do i enter now what does it mean by volume

[tam30over]

can anyone give somemore help on this please

[Neo]

The name, pick a name for it.

[Van Nugent]

The volume label for a drive is just like a name for someone. When you format a drive, you may need to give it a name so that you can easily recognize it, especially on a system that has more than 2 HDDs. Just enter a name for it, like "tam30over 2nd" (without the quotes) for this 2ndary HDD.

Sorry, didn't see your newest post till now. :)

[tam30over]

cheers mate i will try that

[tam30over]

it tells me that it is a incorrect volume name for drive c i just added a name as u said mind its still my main drive i didnt add a second hard drive will my main one not already have a name

[tam30over]

i went and checked my main drives name (ml23g-4) and i put that in to see what would happen and it came up with this.
convert cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. convert may run if this volume is dismounted first, all opened handles to this volume would then be invalid.
would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (y/n)
so what shoul i do

[Van Nugent]

In Windows Explorer, you'll see something like "NF7-S Main (C: )" then NF7-S Main is the name of of the main HDD on my NF7-S system. If you do not see any name in front of the drive letter, try leaving it blank.

[tam30over]

yes van i found that but it came up with read above the last reply you sent
im not sure if its safe to go ahead

[Van Nugent]

Some processes may lock the drive to prevent data corruption when they are running. just make sure you close all applications first then say YES to force dismount.

Forgot to say make sure you backup all important data first.