Alright, I have a 4 year old computer that is starting to slow down, i want to download some more music and movies. I am out of space so I got an 80gig hardrive and i put it in, the first time on slave and now on master. the computer does pick up on the hardrive but it doesn't seem to know it is a hardrive. i can't put on any more music or movies.

What did i do wrong. I have done everything like this to my old computer that ran '95 but I don't know the details of xp.

Can anybody help?

There is not "trick" in xp that I know of.

Make sure your master drive has Windows on it. It needs to have the jumper on the back in the correct position for either "master" or "cable select". Make sure it's plugged into the master port of the cable.

Do the opposite for the slave.

If you have the jumper or the cable position wrong, it can mess it up.

ya, got that, like I said, did all of this on my old computer. It has to be a software issue what do you do as far as software part of installing a hardrive on xp?

The Harddrive has to be formatted first before being picked up by windows xp.

start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management

If you go there, and click on "storage" in the right hand window (You may have something under storage called "Disk Management"

It should bring up a list of all of the drives windows has located. It will show if they are formatted or not, and if there are any partitions.

Try looking there for starters.

Yep probably not formatted. Could either use the manufacturer's bootable CD, or even easier, use windows as UMfan just described. It will show up as "raw" or "unformatted" and you could just right click and do a format, full or quick. File system NTFS or FAT32 would be fine.

When I ran out of space I bought a 250gig external hard drive.

Between my two computers... 1600GB? ish.

Nice zuul.

I've got 750GB on my desktop and I have a 1 terabyte buffalo system as a backup.

you win.

oh wait, 160GB laptop HD, we might be tied.

I've got another 200 in my wife's PC

If your slave drive is not completely noticed by windows...go start, run, then type "control" (without the parentheses) then press enter. Click on Add Hardware. Sometimes XP is dumb and you need to force the issue.

I've had to do this three times lately when swapping drives from old PC's into my new one to extract the data off the disks.

TEH WIFES PC FTW!