Hi good day, i hope you can give me some opinion, while helping my aunt clean-up their old house I found an old hardisk; its a MAXTOR N256 I cant seem to find details of its STORAGE capacity. Anyway My aunt gave it to me since it seems that she don't know were it came from (probably from one of her children). Anyway I want to test it by Installing it on my PC, what i want to know is by doing this what will it do to my PC? is it ok to remove the Functioning hardisk on my PC and put the Old hardisk that i found? what will happen to my functioning HD? will all the file be erased? do i have to reformat my functioning HD when I return it to my PC after testing the Old Hardisk that i found? Or will my PC simply be back on it original settings when I return the original hardisk installed? Hope you can advice me on this.

gene, August 2006

thers loads of ways of doing it the 1 ill try is if u can take ure functional hard drive out of the computer then put the old 1 in then enter the bios settings and they will telll how big it is or set up as a secondary hdd by changing the jumpers on the back of the drive then plug it into a spare slot on the cable and run youre computer as normal u might have to formatt the old 1 to get it working

jamie devey, September 2006

thers loads of ways of doing it the 1 ill try is if u can take ure functional hard drive out of the computer then out the old 1 in then enter the bios settings and they will telll how big it is or set up as a secondary hdd by changing the jumpers on the back of the drive then plug it into a spare slot on the cable and run youre computer as normal u might have to formatt the old 1 to get it working

jamie devey, September 2006

I would remove them both. Then boot from a CD ROM. Then install the new OS. You can put them both back when you have done. Just make a note of any jumpers and cables.

Terry, August 2006

thanks for the info you have provided, actually im not interested In using the old HDD to add aditional storage space for my current system, I'm however interested in using the old HDD to simulate a newly assembled pc system to practice and learn installing and formatting a hdd. my current system already have 2 Hdd's, what would happen to my system if i remove the hdd's currently intalled? will it mess up my PC and its contents? thanks

gene, August 2006

Your original hard disk contains your operating system and so your PC probably won't boot from the old Maxtor. However PCs contain the cables for fitting a second hard disk. You could try the Maxtor out but fitting it as the second hard drive. It need to be jumpered as 'Slave'. When I worked for a hard drive company we put all the jumpering information on our web site so why not try www.maxtor.com

Terry, August 2006