two hard drives

I need a larger hard drive to run a program. I want to get an 80 GB
hard drive on top of the 18 GB hard drive that came with my computer.
How can I tell if my computer can handle that large of a hard drive?
I was told by a friend my motherboard might not be able to handle it,
but how to tell? I was also wondering how the two hard drives would
relate to each other, would I have to toggle between the two or would
they work together. If I would have to toggle between them how is
that done, would it show up like another drive in My Computer? Thank
you for any help you can give this novice computer user.

Running Windows XP
Pentium 4 CPU 1.60 GHz
768 MB RAM

On 4 Dec 2003 00:03:23 -0800, navygin23 RemoveThis @yahoo.com (Jennifer) wrote:

 >I need a larger hard drive to run a program. I want to get an 80 GB
 >hard drive on top of the 18 GB hard drive that came with my computer.
 >How can I tell if my computer can handle that large of a hard drive?

You read the motherboard manual and/or support web site.

 >but how to tell? I was also wondering how the two hard drives would
 >relate to each other, would I have to toggle between the two or would
 >they work together. If I would have to toggle between them how is
 >that done, would it show up like another drive in My Computer? Thank
 >you for any help you can give this novice computer user.

Typically, you would install the new drive as your boot drive, copying the
data from your old drive to the new. Then, you'd reformat the old drive
and use it as additional storage.

For example, assuming your current configuration on IDE0 is

IDE0:
Master: OLD_HDD: Drive C:, bootable
Slave: -empty-

After the upgrade,

IDE0:
Master: NEW_HDD: Drive C:, bootable, clone of OLD_HDD before upgrade
Slave: OLD_HDD: Drive D:, freshly reformatted and empty

Your new drive will likely come with software that will allow you to clone
your old HDD to the new one.

 >Running Windows XP
 >Pentium 4 CPU 1.60 GHz
 >768 MB RAM

Given this CPU, it's quite likely that your motherboard is new enough that
it can handle an 80 GB HDD.

If not, a BIOS upgrade is probably available that will allow you to use
larger hard drives.

Failing that, you can purchase an IDE host controller card and use this to
connect your new HDD.

--
Robert B. Clark (email ROT13'ed)
Visit ClarkWehyr Enterprises On-Line at <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.3clarks.com/ClarkWehyr/" target="_blank">http://www.3clarks.com/ClarkWehyr/</a><!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->