I have been trying to add this second harddrive all day, PCmech really hasnt helped this time, no one responded to the thread. One person told me to just plug it in as the slave drive and when im logged in, just right click the drive an click reformat. I tried and when i tried to boot up it said no OS was found. It might be the BIOS. I played around witgh that but i cant get it to work. This is from the PCmech site post
BIOs help for new HD on Win XP Pro I have been tryin to add another 4GB HD to my 20GB HD in my Emachines T2240. Hal in another thread told me that I had to just plug it in n reformat it, but when my comp trys to boot it wont and it says the OS could not be found. I thought it was the BIOS so I played around with it but i cant get it to work, The HD with XP Pro on it is set on the Master and the Win 98 on Slave. Do I have to put my Win XP Pro cd in and then reformat the drive? HAL said i just had to right click it and click reformat? Someone please help this is driving me nuts.
If you disconnect the 4GB drive, can you boot win xp, if yes, make sure hard disk jumper (master/slave) is right. goto BIOS make sure it can detect your second drive as slave. boot up xp, right click my computer => manage => dish manage, you should find your 4GB drive there, then do whatever you need to do. Good luck.
Not only do your jumpers have to be correct but the IDE ribbon is specific to what goes where. The master jumpered drive (XP) should be hooked to the terminating end connection and the slave to the middle connector. Also some older drives have two jumper positions for mastering, one for master only (single drive) and one for master with slave, dual. Its obvious that your system is seeing the new drive first and never gets to the XP drive and this is a common jumper or ribbon cable snaffu.
As an aside. Once you get the jumpers straightened out, from XP you should go to Control panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk management and here you should see the new drive and you will have to initialise it and then format it. Or if you want to get around this whole mess and format the drive first, if you have a Win98 startup disk you can set the bios to boot from floppy and format from there. First of all to be safe disconnect the XP drive and leave only the new drive connected, boot from the floppy and when the prompt shows type without the quotes "formatc: /u" or something similar, the switch u means unconditional and will wipe the entire drive. Its best to disconnect your XP drive because windows fools around with the drive letters when you boot from floppy and if you or windows gets confused you could end up formating the wrong drive.