a quickie about old used harddrives

[wayne]

i never really had good experience in getting USED harddrives to work... the only harddrives that ever worked for me were brand new ones.... other than that, it never boots....

now, i have several old used harddrives but in pretty good condition... i m pretty sure that most of them work.... they're mostly WD caviars, with small sizes like 3gb, 6gb, 10gb and another one or two drives

tomorrow morning, i am going to test it out by hooking it up to my main rig... i just want to hook it up and load a couple games on it to run... this includes installing windows xp on it, etc to make it work..... how do i do this?...i ve tried this before and it never worked for me..

one of the harddrives (3gb) has windows xp on it and stuff too and i wanna hook that up to see whats inside.. i know the stuff works because it was working when i took it out of my moms computer to put in a 7gb harddrive.... so i wanna try hooking this up first

correct me if im wrong
basically i hook up the drives to the primary IDE controller thru a 80wire IDE cable... then since it'll be the only drive in the computer then, i set the jumper to master right?... then i boot... but then what next?, what if it just doesnt boot?... do i have to go into BIOS to change anything?.... i need exact procedures... PLEASEEE

harddrives have always hated me... ive always tried to avoid them... but now, i wanna face this lil problem and just clear it up so i understand harddrive business

thanks

 

[Xeese]

If installing XP on the drive set the first boot from your CD-rom.

Since you have XP installed already, it should boot and detect the hardware changes. 3 GB is pretty small for putting much on, though. You might do better to format al of the drives, then sell them off on ebay. Use the money to get an 80GB or larger from one of the good deals in the Hot Deals forum.

 

[EquaLiZr]

if one or so dont work, take them apart and use the platters as wind chimes. they actually sound very peacefull