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How do I make a hard drive usable as a spare?

agentnnc

agentnnc

That Guy I Am
So one of my co-workers was throwing out his old PC. I asked him if I could look at it and salvage anything of use (eg: video cards, sound cards, ram disks, etc). I wound up taking his ram disk and hard drive. The problem is that I forgot to ask him to format it first on his PC. I can't get it to work on mine, even by itself. Can someone help me out?
 
You should be able to hook it up onto your hard drive cable, set the jumper to slave, and be good to go. As long as the hard drive you want to boot is set to master, it should load normal and show the new hard drive in 'my computer' so it can be formatted, or the data salvaged off it. A lot of hard drives have little diagrams printed on them that show you how the jumpers should be set. You can use cable select instead of mater/slave, but I forget if the end of the cable is recognized as the primary or the center of the cable... I think the end of the cable is seen as primary. (don't forget to hook up power too...)

If you boot into windows and you still don't see it in my computer, it might be an unrecognized hard drive format. Just right click on my computer, click manage, storage, and then Disk Management (in vista. XP is very simmiliar). From that menu you should be able to see the partition and format it.
 
ok, when i go into the menu to set my hard drive as master and my co-worker's as slave, it wont detect either.
 
How big is the drive? Also try useing a live cd like Parted Magic
 and see if you can format it from there.
 
To set the master/slave you do it physically on the hard drive. I'm assuming it's not sata...

The jumpers are near where you plug cables into the hard drives. If there's not a diagram telling you where to put the jumper on the hard drive itself, you'll have to look up the hard drive models online to figure out how to set the jumpers.
 
Primary Master must ONLY be connected to the middle port on the IDE cable. Primary Slave must ONLY be connected to the end of the cable. The Primary cable is directional and color coded. You can't plug it in anyway you want. The drive jumpers should be set to either Master or Slave and attached in the correct position on the cable.

Don't think it matters for Secondary Master/Slave. Primary & Secondary are two physically separate cables from the board, each with 2 ports Master & Slave. If you have only one cable, then its Primary and the ordering of Master/Slave matters.
 
Ok, I'll try that next time I have access to my PC (I'm on the go with my laptop now).
 
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