Need to enslave a hard drive... can anyone help?

[The Doctor.]

I had a 30gig hard drive with slight errors I've been using for over 4 years. It only showed up with errors recently, but aside from minor problems I could handle, it worked ok. The problem was I could not put my new Win XP OS on it because of the disk errors.
Today I installed a new Hitachi 80gig HD and installed winXP and reloaded all my critical devices. (what a pleasant surprise that XP seemed to have the drivers for most of them already.)

NOW, I want to make my old drive a slave drive, with all the current info intact so that I can transfer files to my new HD.

I was hoping for the best when I hooked it up, but the PC wouldn't even function... at all. So I removed the ribbon and power to the old drive and now everything works fine... except I have a good amount of data (25gig worth) on the old drive I'd really like to get at without having to disconnect the new drive, reconnect the old, burn everything to disk, disconnect the old drive, reconnect the.... you get the idea.

If I have to I will, but I know there are many technophiles around here who could save me many many hours with a few minutes of their own.

And I'd be forever grateful.

And it would be a great thread to keep as a reference for others.

Did I mention eternal gratitude?

Thanks.

[democracyindanger]

1. Jumpers

Go to the website of the manufacturer of your old drive, and search the support section for information on jumpers. There may even be a sticker on the drive itself with a diagram for jumper settings. You might have to make a change in the BIOS, too--but I'm not sure about that, so you may want to wait for a definitive answer from one of DU's alphageeks.

But I know it starts with jumpers.

[The Doctor.]

2. Thanks.

Sounds like a bit more work, but that's ok if I wind up with a slave drive.

Off the top of your head, do you know where I might install these 'jumpers', and do you have any idea why my PC wouldn't even function (the screen was black, no HD activity, no input response) while I had both drives hooked up? -The ribbon was daisy-chained, the power source didn't appear to be but may have been.

Thanks again.

[democracyindanger]

3. Jumpers are

little plastic/metal blocks that fit over the pins on the back of your drive. You don't have to install them--they're already there. Depending on where you physically place the jumpers determines the slave/master status of the drive. As installed, your old drive was set to 'master' via the jumpers.

Your PC probably didn't work with both drives because of the conflict created by hooking up two master drives. The BIOS was probably confused, so it did nothing.

Here's a page I found with pictures. It looks pretty helpful.

http://www.harddriveupgrade.com/jumper_pins.shtml

[The Doctor.]

4. Awesome.

I don't think anyone has ever answered a tech query in such a succinct and comprehensive way.
I remember seeing tiny little blocks with little bitty metal handles/hooks... if that' them I'm in business.


I'll check the link out.

Big thanks!

[RoyGBiv]

5. Small addendum ...

A lot of drives have a "cable select" setting for the jumpers. If both your drives have this, the easiest thing to do is use "cable select" for both and make sure the drives are plugged into the appropriate place on the cable. Master is the one at the end. Slave is the one in the middle.

[The Doctor.]

6. Yeah... think I did just that...

The end of the ribbon went to the main drive and the connection that bisected the ribbon went in the 'slave to be'.

Is there a setting to facilitate this?

[RoyGBiv]

7. Settings ...

If you have the jumpers set appropriately, that should be all the settings you need. The BIOS will base master/slave on this.

[The Doctor.]

8. Thanks again.

I'll look it up.