Install an exterior hard drive

Hi,
This is my first post so I hope I am at the right place.
I have two problems with my computer right now. The first one is that it keeps freezing up on my and I have to reboot several times a day.

The second one is that my sound is messed up. I get a crackling noise everytime I listen to music or anything on the computer. I have moved my speakers to another device and they are fine and my head set I use with my stereo and they are fine so I know it is the computer.

The other thing I need help with is I have an external hard drive I need to install but I don't know how to do that.
My hard drive is almost full and I need more space.

Thanks for your help,
Cele

 

you need to give a little more information about your computer. and what you are doing when it freezes up. the last thing the hard drive is probably your easiest fix. do you have a hard drive picked out and to be clear you want an external hard drive one that plugs into a usb or firewire port or do you want to install it inside the case

 

Hi Buggabear
Thanks for replying.Ok this is alll I know about what I lovingly call my little dinosaur.
It is an Amera computer. 598MHz, 12gig harddrive, 640MB Ram. It has a 2002 version of Windows XP. There is only about 9% of the hard that is free (1.2 g of space) .There doesn't seem to be any particular time or reason for it to freeze. But there is one website that I go to, www.etsy.com. I have a shop there. It is full of artists and other crafts folks who have tons of pictures. When I go into a particular part of that website it feeezes up almost everytime. I understand they use a Flash program so that may have something to do with it. But it also freezes up when I go to Yahoo. But it is not limited to those places. It also does it in Hotmail, but again not limited to that.
I have done virus scans and malware scans using AVG and SUPER Anti-Spyware, and Malwarebytes'Antimaleware.. There were some things found and illiminated. but it is still freezing up.

The sound issue is another puzzle. It is much worse on some websites and with some music, but it crackles all the time now. It seems to be getting worse. I have gone into the sound devices and adjusted the levels but that doesn't help at all. Could it be the sound card is going bad?


I already have a drive to install It is a WD800JB WD Caviar SE, 80GB, EIDE Drive.
I also read another of the related posts below and I was wondering if I make this one a Slave to the original one does it still need the 4 pin molex connector?
I am not sure what kind of drive is already in there. I can't read the label without taking the drive out.
I don't know much about all this but I am learning fast.
Thanks so much for your help.

Cele

 

Yes you will need the connector, that supplies the power to the hard drive, you will also have to make sure the jumpers are in the correct place so it can become the slave. there should be a diagram on the hard drive showing the jumper location.

 

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407
I know you said you ran a malware scan and found some things. goto this link follow the instructions to do a full scan just in case, there are a few more cleaning processes you should probably go through.

 

Thanks Buggabear. I will run those scans tomorrow.

I did install the hrd drive last night and it went well except that the computer is not recognizing the new drive as a slave but as a secondary master. The jumper is in the slave slot. I checked it twice. But it still says secondary master in the BIOS. Did I do something wrong. It seems pretty straight forward. The other hard drive is already plugged intot he port that I plugged in the middle plug n into the second drive and attached the power connector. It works fine . It tooks the files I transferred. The only things that is not as you said is the slave recongition.

 

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but in one of my older computers, the second hard drive is listed as a secondary master, I've been using it like that for years(hopefully correctly) and have had no problems. There's probably a way to change how the computer views the second hard drive in the start up bios config. but I'm no expert on that so I'm not going to send you there to tamper with it. Hopefully someone else will read this post and have a better idea.

 

I hope I"m in the right place here, but hoping someone can help me.
Ok, this is my problem. My friends comp took a dump. A friend told her that it was definatelythe hard drive. I thought ok, lets find out how to replace it. But than was told by someone that it may be the a ram chip that's bad & to (think she has 4 chps?) And to rearrage them & or take them all out & try cking comp 1 by 1 to find the bad ram chip. Don't know if that makes sense to me but am willing to try that later today. Did try to reinstall Windows Xp & it just won't take it. That's the point where my friend told me that the Hard Drive was shot. NOt an expert in any way on computer, but want to help as $$ is tight. Can anyone here help me??

 

Hi Lesann, you will need to start a new thread

 

Ok then I will leave the hard drive as is for now.

I am about to start the malware clean up as per the link you sent me to .. I already have Spybots and SUPERAnti-Spyware on my computer and I have AVG as my anti virus program. I have not installed any other anti virus program but I think Windows has something on here. Windows Defender...is that an anti virus software?
MY question is do I need to uninstall any of these before I start. I have read through the whole thing and I see that I wil need Super AntiSpyware and Spybots in the process but I wanted to now if I need to take htem off now and then reinstall them during the process?

 

I wouldn't uninstall anything right, now however I would disable them until after you have completed the mal ware scan. During the scan the only protection program running should be the scan you are dealing with.