Installing a second hard drive

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Guest

As an inexperienced computer user I would like to install a second hard drive
on my budget Dell dimension 2400. My good friends at Dell, from what I can
observe, chose not to install a second connector on my motherboard.I believe
I can install a dual connector to overcome this problem.
I know I have to hook to jumper cables and reconfigure connection so the
second hard drive is a slave hard drive. I either lost or wasn't provided
with an Owner's Manual. The good people at Dell make no provision for this at
their No Help and Support page. You are constantly told to refer to the
Owner's Manual. I'm sure they would delive a manual or provide for a download
at a cost.

Any help or guidance that can be provided would be gratly appreciated. I
have a manual from an earlier system that probably can be used in lieu of not
having the specific manual for my computer.

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated by this challenged
computer user. I would like to install Windows XP Professional on this drive,
not the bastardized Dell OEM veersion of Windows Home Edition.

A man in need of help. If you assist I 'm exteremely grateful.
Thanks
 
If you need a ribbon cable with a second connector on it, your local
computer store has them at a low cost.

Going over the installation,
The motherboard has two ribbon cable connectors on it for your drives.
You usually hook both hard drives on one cable and you probably have your CD
drive hooked up to a second ribbon cable.
You need to change jumpers on the hard drives so you have a master and a
slave.
Or in some cases they use cable select.
This is just a case of trying to see which works best.
After hooking up the drives, you need to boot into the BIOS to see that the
system recognizes all the drives.
Watch the screen closely to see which key to press.
While you are in the BIOS, check to see that the CD drive boots before the
hard drive does.
Reboot with the XP CD installed, and watch the screen again to press any key
to boot from the CD drive.

You can delete all the partitions to clean the hard drive, then create new
ones and format them in NTFS.

Good luck,
 
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