"Puter help Please.

[Wilber_Stool]

I have a four year old Comaq Desk Pro( I know, I know) running Win XP Pro. I would like to install an old 20 gig hard drive to use as a slave. This old drive has Win 98 installed on it.
While I have an extra power plug on the wiring harness, I only have one plug on the IDE cable. I do have a cable with two plugs marked Master and Slave.
Something tells me that this will not be as easy as plug it in and run. I could really use the extra storage. Any advice? Warnings? Thanks in advance.

[ET Awful]

1. Actually the cable with two connectors should work fine.

Just make sure that the jumpers on the drive you're adding are set for slave, and you should be fine.

[Wilber_Stool]

2. Is that

the little port between the IDE and the power? Five pins across the top and bottom. White plug now across pins three and four on the bottom.

[ET Awful]

5. Yes, those are the jumpers . . .

there should be a label on the drive showing which 2 pins represent slave, master and cable select (or might even be just stamped into the metal or plastic above the pins). That might be abbreviated to just SL, MA and CS

Just make sure that the pins for the slave setting are bridged by that little white jumper you mentioned and you're all set.

[Kellanved]

3. Should be easy

A four year old PC should support HDs that size and not require better HD cables (UDMA 66).

As to the wiring itself:
Your main drive should go the top plug, the secondary to the one in the middle of the cable. The order should not really matter, but you should never leave the top plug "open" (the middle one is no problem).
Important is that the red strand of the cable is plugged into "Pin 1" on the Mainboard and the HDs. Usually that is the right-hand side.

You'll have to set the secondary drive to "slave". This is done by adjusting the jumpers on the back of the drive.

[trotsky]

4. If the above suggestions do not work,

look at both drives for a jumper setting called "Cable Select". Because your cable is labeled with Master and Slave, if both drives are set to Cable Select, their position on the cable will determine their identities. Just make sure your XP drive is on Master and you'll be fine.

[ET Awful]

6. Not all motherboards can handle cable select though. . .

Many, but not all.

[trotsky]

7. True, I'm making an assumption.

Assuming that the cable came with it!

[ET Awful]

8. Hmmm. . .

But the cable didn't come with it :) (see original post). The cable that's installed now only has a single drive connector.