Problems with a new hard drive; please help

[Venom]

Ok so I just bought this new hard drive:
Western Digital SATA
250 GB
7200 RPM
16 MB CACHE

I have an existing SATA drive, but when I hook up the new one it causes a boot failure as neither is detected by the BIOS then. I thought I was totally screwed, but when I removed the new one, now my computer works fine again. What am I doing wrong?

[Venom]

Someone else took this picture, but it is identical to what to the error that displays for me:

Now all you have to do is add ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US, and the poorly written error message will be complete!

[userfriendly]

Here you go

[Venom]

Normally, I might be a little irritated that you didn't help out with the hard drive thing. But I'm not, BECAUSE IT WORKS NOW! WOOHOO! Instead, I thank you for adding that line to the pic. Good stuff.

[Aristocrat]

Just curious, what was the issue? Was it a bios setting? Or something else?

[Venom]

Heh. Everyone always wants to know how a problem was fixed. I would.
Well, I did some extensive searching in Google, and after gathering and cross-checking information, I concluded that I needed to:

1) Set the jumper to the 5-6 slot. It seems my outdated VIA chipset wasn't detecting the new SATA II standard.
2) Install the drivers included on the CD
3) Punch myself for taking so long to figure this out

Hey, at least maybe somebody with this same problem will read this post someday and it will be the solution they've been looking for.

I still am just a bit concerned though over some of the things I read regarding this issue. It would seem that some individuals still had problems after the drive appeared to be working (i.e. BSOD). As far as I can tell though, everything is working OK.

[Venom]

To shift gears a bit, how should I use this new 250 GB of space? I've never had two hard drives before, and I'm not sure how to best utilize this. I'd like to just drag and drop program files and folders, but it's not that simple because of the stupid Windows Registry. First things first, I haven't been able to properly defragment my original hard drive in a very long time because of the lack of free space. I'll need to deal with this issue ASAP.

[Freddie]

To shift gears a bit, how should I use this new 250 GB of space? I've never had two hard drives before, and I'm not sure how to best utilize this. I'd like to just drag and drop program files and folders, but it's not that simple because of the stupid Windows Registry. First things first, I haven't been able to properly defragment my original hard drive in a very long time because of the lack of free space. I'll need to deal with this issue ASAP.

I would keep my OS and apps on the oringal drive and install another OS (Xp, 98, 2000 Liunx your choice) as backup just in case anything goes wrong you already have a hard drive with Windows ready to run. Primarily though I would store my Movies and music on it, it's not going to be used day in and day out so it's less likely to fail.

[Aristocrat]

Curses....I never thought you may have had an older motherboard....drat.

On the new harddrive, do whatever you want with it, but I personally would most definitely partition it.

[Venom]

Yeah, 250 GB is a lot for a single partition. :hmmm:

A dual-boot system might be good, since it could be used to easily back up data if one OS gets corrupted. I can acquire a legit copy of Windows 2000 for free, but already some games won't run on it (e.g. Company of Heroes, Ghost Recon), but putting another Windows XP installation seems kind of dumb. If only I could get my hands on a copy of Vista...

[Titus]

Hey great thread, I'm going to be buying a sata 250g hard drive for more space well to put all my other games on it. I already have a 250 but need another! My computer is all sata dvd drive is and hard drive.