PC hardware forum: What to do with old hard drive when new one is added

Yes, unplug the old drive to make certain the new HD is booting correctly. Then format it so it's no longer bootable. Then continue to copy your personal files onto it for extra storge and back-up.

If the new drive is working fine and you can use it then just reformat the second with a D: drive letter.

Your lucky it works at all. This causes serious conflicts for some PCs. You have a very confused PC, it is befuddled but not saying, No, and shutting it down as it should be and sending you error message.

Are your BIOS current and up to date?

This thread untracked.

now that you have a new main c: drive turn off your pc unplug the old hard drive and disconnect it.. in the old drive you should find a set of jumpers for master, slave .and i think auto. move the jumper so that its set to slave this should stop your bios from trying to boot from it. then reconnect and all should be well.. hope this helps

Wow! I want to thank all of you who answered my original post. I've always said that the CNet community is the greatest. Now, for those who brought up changing the jumper settings and ribbon placement as the cure, I'll add some details I left out of my original post to save space. The new drive is SATA and is cabled to a serial port on the motherboard, not connected to the ribbon cable. The old hard drive and a second hard drive (formerly C: and F:, now G: and F:) on the ribbon cable were respectively set as master and slave. (D: and E: are optical drives.) The information I got about installing a new drive serially while old drive(s) were connected in parallel setup (using ribbon cable) was to leave the old main drive jumper in the master position, which I did.

As for updating the BIOS, the sources I read were in agreement that one should NOT do this unless there was a good reason to do it, which I don't think is the case here. So I'll go back to the advice of the first responder--unplug the old main drive (and also my secondary old drive), test the computer to see if it boots and runs OK. If all works well, then format the old drive and possibly use it for extra storage. Again--thanks to all of you for taking the time to give me your advice!

Thanks, porsche10x, for your interesting suggestion. You understand about he cables and jumbers. Yes, most of the time the system boots from the new hard drive, but once in a while hops back to the old one. First I'll see whether formatting the old drive eliminates the problem. Maybe you can tell me, is there a way within the system to check the CMOS battery, or would it be simpler just to replace it? I replaced the mother board just a couple years ago--I assume that it would have had a new CMOS battery. Still, as you say, sometimes they wear out faster than they should.

I have to agree with porsche10x that the battery is the likely culprit behind the "dual" booting error. I've done a very similar
thing, a new hard drive with a clean install, and have not had a bios/cmos problem like that. The only time I had a problem like that was with an old system (DOS/WIN3.1) whose battery had actually corroded and wouldn't remember the system setup.

On another note, reformatting might work even with a dead battery depending on your bios. Since Win XP and esp. since Vista bios' have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd boot devices. If you specify a cd/dvd drive as the 1st and have 2 drives it would check first one then the other even with only one device selected. The same is true for harddrives, it will check the ide bus first; Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave; then to SATA harddrives; SATA1, SATA2, etc., until it finds a bootable OS.

However, replacing the battery is easy enough and inexpensive to do and probably the best solution. But if your system is a newer one I have to wonder how the battery died so fast.