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D_E_Bishop's avatar
D_E_Bishop
Explorer
Feb 10, 2015

Adding a Serial ATA HDD to existing

A little background, my five year old Gateway desktop with 500 GB SATA HDD wouldn't boot, took it to BB and they used their program to back up and ran diagnostic and told me the HDD was going bad. I installed a new HDD and retained the old one in the bay but disconnected. It is running Windows Home Premium. I want to connect it and run a separate backup program and then try to restore to an earlier date.

Is there any thing I need to do besides hook up the two cables and run the HDD's in parallel?

Older HDDs had jumpers the SATA drives don't.
  • fj12ryder's avatar
    fj12ryder
    Explorer III
    Feb 12, 2015
    joebedford wrote:
    My old 1TB SATA drive will lock up my PC if I access some particular high sectors. As long as I stay away from those sectors, it works fine. So I cloned it onto a new 2TB drive which is now my primary. I back up to the old drive.
    Just out of curiosity, do you run the SMART utility? If so, does it give you any indications that the HDD is on the way out?
  • joebedford's avatar
    joebedford
    Nomad II
    Feb 12, 2015
    My old 1TB SATA drive will lock up my PC if I access some particular high sectors. As long as I stay away from those sectors, it works fine. So I cloned it onto a new 2TB drive which is now my primary. I back up to the old drive.
  • fj12ryder's avatar
    fj12ryder
    Explorer III
    Feb 10, 2015
    Well, actually you're running them in "Serial" rather than "Parallel". :) SATA rather than PATA. LOL
  • Campfire_Time's avatar
    Campfire_Time
    Explorer
    Feb 10, 2015
    Nope, just plug it in and it should work fine. Jumpers are old technology. SATA doesn't need anything like that.

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