Adding A New HDD In WinXP

I'm recently on vacation in a far off country and noticed that my families primary hdd is running out of space. So I opted to buy them a new one and installed it myself. I basically left the primary drive's jumper set to Master, and the secondary drive without a jumper so it would work as a Slave. According to the Segate website (where both of our hdd's are from), that's the best way to setup a spare drive.

I also followed the instructions on the hdd sticker which said to boot into the Bios Menu as soon as I turned the computer on. In order to select AUTO DETECT, and enable LOGICAL BLOCK ADDRESSING (LBA). Just as a note, the portion of the menu that contained LBA was set to AUTO prior to me changing it.

After that I booted up into WinXp and launched the Disk Management tool. Initiated the hdd, right clicked it, selected to use the Partition Wizard, chose to use the drive as a Primary Partition, Selected the entire space available for use, set a drive letter, left something as ''Predetermined'' (I don't remember what it was, something about choosing 256, 512, or some other kb), and lastly chose NTFS. The hdd formatted and now shows up as a HEALTHY basic hdd.

I just wanted to know if I did this right or if I messed up at any point. All I wanted to do was to use the entire new drive as pretty much a storage for new data. I haven't done this in years so I'm a bit rusty which is why I'm wondering if I messed up on any of the steps.


BTW it's a PATA IDE drive!


THANKS

 

As long as it works the way you want.
I have seen some drives that were pre-formatted.
Did you install on the middle connector of the cable?That is the one for secondary drives.The very end one is the Master.

 

Is your primary drive a lot smaller and older than your new drive? The reason I ask that
is your new drive may be faster than your old drive. If I were you I would use the new
drive as the boot drive transfering everything off your old drive with the free program
hdrive clone. During this process you can use the auto expand option to use the whole
new disk. Then set the new drive as master and use your old drive for spair files. Rember
every time you add another program it wants to install to your c drive every time Windows downloads an update or your virus program adds an update it writes it to C .

 

Yes sir I did.

Yes sir my parents primary drive is smaller and older than the new one. The new one is faster and 5 times as big (old hdd is a 40GB 5200rpm, new one is 160GB 7200rpm). I actually tried to clone the drive with ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE, but the ACRONIS image creator boot disc didn't work on this pc for some reason. I will check out that program your talking about. THANKS!

I'm just worried about the steps I took in Window XP's Disk Management, and the LBA setting I selected in their BIOS. I have no idea what LBA is for, and wonder if I should have left that area set to AUTO instead of LBA.


I'm leaving back off vacation in two days so I can't leave my parents pc messed up because I won't be back for possibly another year or two.