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funkij

6 Posts

11881

February 25th, 2005 09:00

Installing a second hard drive (ATA) on my Dell 8300 XPS

I have recently bought a 200 Gig Seagate S-ATA hard drive for my PC for my Dell 8300 XPS. I intend on using this as my second drive, as my PC came with an 80 Gig IDE hard drive.

Just before installing the drive, I looked on the Dell website and it states that both of my drives need to be either ATA or IDE. The manual doesn’t say this. My motherboard supports S-ATA and I haven’t used these yet.

Can I simply buy an S-ATA cable (or some sort of S-ATA to IDE converter) or do I need to return the drive and replace it with an IDE (Which I don’t really want to do)?

Thanks in advance,

John

kjharris

428 Posts

February 25th, 2005 14:00

The 8300 can have 2 SATA drives and 2 PATA(IDE) drives or any other combo, but a SATA drive must be the master(boot) drive. So in your situation the 80gb IDE drive is currently the boot drive since it's your only drive, but when you add the SATA drive it must be made the master(boot) drive. The software that came with your new drive will give you a choice of making it the boot drive and transferring the files so select that choice. Your old drive will now be the second(slave) drive.

Ken

funkij

6 Posts

February 25th, 2005 15:00

I didn't realise that...

 

Thanks Ken!

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