How do i.......

ok i have this old mobo that doesnt support raid (duh!) well i came across another HD that i would like to add, but last time i added a HD it went all to hell

well, i was wondering what i have to do so windows doesnt give me the bird, and how do i do it safely?

any help would rock!

BTW all i have is 2 IDE ports and that is it and i have no money to go get a raid card

You wouldn't need a RAID controller simply to add another drive. A PCI IDE controller would work fine.

In this case, you wouldn't need either. The easiest way to do this is to attach it to either normal IDE channel which has an available master or slave location. Assuming that you have a HDD on Primary Master and optical drive on Secondary Master, configure the jumpers on the drive as Slave. Attach the drive to the spare connector on either line. If you are going to be burning data from this disk, I'd use the Primary channel to avoid IDE channel contention. As long as the drive is not configured the same as the other drive on the channel and not configured to boot in BIOS you'll be fine.

ok question, how do i configure the drive to not conflict, that was the problem last time

Which drive are you using? Manufacturer and model. This will allow you to look up the jumper settings. Also, check BIOS and make sure that the optical and HDD are set as master currently. The setting of either doesn't matter as long as two devices with the same master/slave setting ae not on the same channel. The addressing is simply by an ID bit and normally makes little difference in terms of practical operation.

ok well i know the jumper settings but i am not sure if it will do what it did last time
and when i format the drive in fdisk, how do make it so it isnt c: drive?

*BUMP*

i realy need to know this!

You can do this through FDISK, but if you are using XP or 2K, it's easier to use Disk Management.

Disk Management is accesssible through Start > Settings > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. You can initialize, partition and format the drive from there.

To use FDISK, make the set up the partition as normal and then verify that the drive is not set as active. Normally, this would require that both disks are in the computer, if I remember correctly.