There is a small jumper on the back of the new drive. It must be moved to the "Slave" position. Read the harddrive directions.

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Or maybe your harddrive has primary and secondary jumper positions. Then set the new one as Secondary. You cannot have 2 drives set as Primary.

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Manufacturer's website should provide a utility. I recommend Maxtor's, just because I recently used it to do the same thing after trying three other things. Just put your old drive as master, the new one as slave, boot into Windows, and let it clone it. (Assuming you want to clone it, anyway).

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hey chuck..i have my old drive as primary the new one as secondary..thats wat i did from the start.. leave it, or u gonna f--- it

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"hey chuck..i have my old drive as primary the new one as secondary..thats wat i did from the start.." not according to the very first sentence in your first post which stated "hi ppl..i just bought new 80gb hard drive..i have 20gb on my system right now...the 80gb i made it primary." Ok so which is set to primary, the original 20 gig or your new 80 gig?

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Following this thread, I agree with Stuart!

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I cannot believe what I am reading here...make new drive primary or logical, doesn't matter a bit every drive can be primary and what I think Chuck and Stuart are confusing here is "active" as there can only be one active drive. For my way if the drives are not partitioned I would make every drive primary. If you simply want to add a second drive and not put OS on it, that is fine, go into Control Panel, Admin Tools, Comp Management, Storage, Disk Management and Partition and format the new drive and them put whatever you want on it. Make the OS drive master by jumpering that and the new drive slave and you are good to go.

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>> For my way if the drives are not partitioned I would make every drive primary.<< I think we are getting confused with terminology here. With IDE drives you can have two primary drives. A primary Master and a primary slave along with a secondary master and a secondary slave. Whether they are primary or secondary is determined by which cable they are plugged into. Whether they are slave or master is determined by the jumpers on the back of the drive. Then there are primary partitions which is determined when the drive is partitioned with up to four primary partitions. A partition can be made active. There was a time that there could only be one active primary partition on a drive. Thats why extended partitions containing logical drives where invented. Now all four primary partitions can be active so there is little need for extend partitions although Fdisk still won't allow you to create more than one primary partition on a disk. Third party tools will. A partition can also be made bootable or it can be hidden. You can have as many bootable partitions you wish, but only one can be used to boot the computer without either changing the BIOS configuration or using a boot manager. Which drive the computer is booted from is determined by the BIOS settings, normally the primary master but with modern BIOS can be any drive, be it a primary master, or a primary slave or a secondary master or a secondary slave as long as it contains a primary partition that is bootable and contains an OS. Linux can be booted from an extended partition. Windows can't. When the original poster said he made the new drive a primary I assumed he meant a primary master or a primary slave. As there was only one hard disk the BIOS would have been configured to boot from the primary master. Without reconfiguring the BIOS to boot for the original drive which could be almost anything it is little wonder the computer never booted. Stuart

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Thanks for reassurance Stuart...yes I was thinking partition and not master vs slave... I guess because everyone was saying primary with no reference to master or slave.

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