I have a friend who owns a hewlett packard desktop pc. It has an Intel Pentium 4- 3.2Ghz Cpu and 3 Gigs of RAM. Model # of Desktop not known at this time. So I don’t know what motherboard is in this machine.
It has Win XP Pro for its operating system with SP 3 and currently has installed a Western Digital 320 Gb EIDE Hdd. My friend purchased another Western Digital 500 Gb SATA Hdd and wants to know if he can run both Hdd’s in his machine together. I do know the Mobo is capable of utilizing both eide 40 pin connectors and SATA power and data cables.
If it is possible to run both Hdd’s together in the same machine then we would like to know if they should be run as master and slave or is there a better configuration for these two Hdd’s to be installed together.
Thank you very much for your time and I will post the exact names,model #s serial numbers etc. of the hard drives as soon as I get
The computer is a Hewlett-Packard XW4300 Desktop workstation. Motherboard model # 0A00h. The Operating system is Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3, 32 Bit and is currently installed on a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200 EIDE S/N WCAMR1898251. The system is working correctly under this configuration.
My friend has backed up his data on an External WD Hard drive. He has purchased a Western Digital WD5000AAKS SD Caviar Blue (16MB Cache) SATA Drive S/N WMAYUT1228937 which he would like to install as the C:\ Drive and re-install his win xp pro Service Pack 3 OS on the larger SATA drive. He would also like to install the older 320 Gb EIDE drive as a storage drive in this system.
His current MotherBoard is both EIDE and SATA capable; meaning there are data and power receptacles for both types of drives on his current mobo. He also has the necessary power and data cables for both EIDE and SATA hookups
Can you please help us to figure the best way to do this?
Hi unplug the ide drive plug in the sata one and boot from the restore disks it will install to the sata drive. As it is sata there is no master and slave only ide drives have that. Once you have xp back up and running on the sata drive just plug the ide drive back in. If you do not have the restore dvds you will have to get the sata drivers and use the f6 function when the windows install asks you for third party drivers.
Thanks again for the suggestion. My friend will be away on business until Sunday night; I will not be talking with him again until Monday morning. We will try your suggestion then and I will let you know how things turned out.
Thanks very much for your time.! Sorry for the delay.
It seems my friend was somewhat ahead of the game because he had made an image of his 320 Gb EIDE drive on Symantec Backup Software. So we formatted the new 500 Gb SATA Drive and installed the backup image on the SATA drive, Made a couple minor changes in the BIOS and rebooted and now we had the WIN XP PRO SP3 OS on the new drive and working just fine. Thanks to your guidance, (and you were right) all we had to do then was seat the old drive and plug in the Data and Power Cables and the 320 Gb EIDE appeared just as nicely as you please in “My Computer”.
We then tested the setup to see if we could move folders and files from the 0 drive to drive 1 and all was right with the world.
Both drives also showed up as they should have in “Disk Management”
Thank you very much for your help and we can mark this a successful “Case Closed”
