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linuxpc

3 Posts

25198

January 30th, 2006 03:00

can i add a second internal hard drive to my optiplex gx1 small form factor pc

I just got an optiplex gx1 pc small form factor from a friend . It has only 10gb. I wanted to increase the hard disk capacity to 100gb. I have currently linux fedore core 4 installed on it. I was wondering if I can add a second hard disk to this pc. When I opened, I couldn't see any slot for the second hard disk. Still I was wondering if anybody has come across this, and has any tricks to get the second one. I don't use the 3.5 inch diskette drive all that much(can i take it out and put a 100gb hard disk there). Currently I have a cd drive/3.5 floppy drive/1 EIDE hard disk(10gb)
 
How about the power supply to the new hard disk.
 
as an option 2,if option one above not feasible, I am wondering if  can  transfer the contents of my old disk to a brand new disk and expect this to work. How do I transfer the contents of this old disk to the new disk. Am not much of  a hardware  tech person, so any help is great
 

peterfelgate_ce40d3

1.3K Posts

January 30th, 2006 06:00

Altough the IDE controller and bios will support a second disk up to 120 Gbytes, you will note there's no second IDE connector nor real space to place such a disk as well as there usually being no spare power connector for it.  The power supply is very small and depending on which model you have and which disk you are adding may not power a second disk.  The best approach is to upgrade the disk after copying the current one across.  Note if you have other upgrades you may start to strain the power supply.
Copying the disk to a new one is easy using either a product like Ghost or sometimes disks come with appropriate manufacturer's utilities to do this.  However, this relies on being able to add the second drive.  The simplest option is to temporarily disconnect the CDROM and use the power connector and data cable from that - make sure all the software you need is on floppy or the original hard disk first.  The new drive needs to be jumpered to the cable select position not master or slave.  Note, if you have the SFF case this has a slimline CDROM and the above approach won't work as the connector is special.  An alternative for powering the second disk is to buy a cheap HDD USB to IDE kit; these come with their own power supply that you can use to supply temporarily power whilst you copy the contents across using the IDE connection....

linuxpc

3 Posts

January 30th, 2006 13:00

Great answer! Thank you. Only option 2 will work for me.

Am going to try copying the current disk to a new(120gb) disk thru' a  HDD USB to IDE kit.

From these forums, I guess the maximum size of the disk without any additional hardware is

120gb.

peterfelgate_ce40d3

1.3K Posts

January 30th, 2006 18:00

Max is 120Gbytes.  Note that copying files using a USB connection doesn't I believe result in a bootable drive (unless something like Ghost can cater for it)....hence the suggestion for a temporarily lash up on the IDE cable....if I'm wrong, someone will soon be along to correct me....

Message Edited by peterfelgate on 01-30-2006 02:35 PM

speedstep

9 Legend

 • 

47K Posts

February 4th, 2006 22:00

I routinely remove the CDROM and use the power and IDE cable for the CDROM on a second drive. This is also how you clone from one drive to another via GHOST DOS boot floppy.

The USB to IDE kits are usually under $25 dollars though so they are a good temporary fix.

There is a way to clone or copy that is like ghost when using WIN98 or WINME.

Heres how to do it.

1. Make a startup disk and make sure that FDISK and FORMAT.COM are on the disk.
Format.com

2. Put the New drive in as the primary. The old drive is not attached but sitting somewhere safe.

3. FDISK then FORMAT C: /S

4. After verifying that the drive is formatted and boots to C:\ turn off the pc.

5. Put the old drive back.

6. Attach the drive to the USB to IDE bridge and power up then boot the pc and install the drivers so that WIN98 sees it. OR temporarliy remove the cdrom and make the new drive the D: on the CDROM connectors.

7. Your New drive will be D: or E: etc. With windows fully booted you should see your new drive as D: or E: etc. Open a DOS window and type in the following.

XCOPY C:\ D:\ /r /i /c /h /k /e /y /s

It will copy all the files to your new drive.

Then shut down and make the New drive the primary and the old drive you keep as a backup. Put your cdrom back.

You must put the NEW Drive in as the Primary C: drive and format and make Bootable.
FDISK will not allow you to make the D: partition active.

The USB to IDE brige looks like this

http://www.usbfirewire.com/Parts/rr-usb-usb2ide.html

 

 

peterfelgate_ce40d3

1.3K Posts

February 5th, 2006 10:00

SpeedStep - Ref using the CDROM connectors - I usually acknowledge in my posts that this method was originally suggested by you; I forgot this time...
 
OP - I regularly used to use the XCOPY method and never had a problem.  However in certain rare circumstances the truncation of file names involved CAN cause files to be erroneously named so do make sure everything is OK after the copy. (search the web for info on this; there are some demonstrations of what can happen). 

linuxpc

3 Posts

February 5th, 2006 14:00

Thank you for your answers.
I ended up using ftp to tranfer all user-files from my old hard disk to a second machine, and then
put the new disk in the old disk's place. And then re-installed  linux, and after re-installing, transferred the files back. Next time, when I upgrade another pc, I will use the usb to ide technique you suggested.
 
 

speedstep

9 Legend

 • 

47K Posts

February 7th, 2006 10:00


@peterfelgate wrote:
SpeedStep - Ref using the CDROM connectors - I usually acknowledge in my posts that this method was originally suggested by you; I forgot this time...
 
OP - I regularly used to use the XCOPY method and never had a problem.  However in certain rare circumstances the truncation of file names involved CAN cause files to be erroneously named so do make sure everything is OK after the copy. (search the web for info on this; there are some demonstrations of what can happen). 




You will lose all long file names unless you do the xcopy from a DOS WINDOW from within Windows.

Or you must use a long file backup utility like lfnbackup first.

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