Hi I've just bought the Samsung HD502IJ hard disk and I am trying to install it myself. My old HD had a 'disk failure', and what I am trying to do is make the Samsung be the master HD, install windows XP on it, then connect the old HD as slave and try to save as many files as possible from it. These are the photos of my old HD as it is installed at the moment: And these are the photos of my new HD: Here are my questions: 1. I've marked with red an extension of the power cable of my old HD, that goes somewhere in the motherboard behind some other cables. The power cable that came with the Samsung (see photo above) does not have this extra extension. If I use the new power cable do I let the old extra-cable be connected or not? (does anyone know what is it used for?). 2. Since I don't know many things about hardware, I did a bit of research and found out that my new Samsung HD does not need to be configured as master (or slave for that matter) since it's SATA-II. Therefore I don't change the pin settings. Is this correct? After the Windows XP installation, how do I connect the old HD? Do I have to set the old HD as a slave first? If yes, as you can see the pins do not have any jumpers... Do I connect it with the Samsung HD as well? I used to connect two older HDDs with cables similar to those: How do I connect together the two above? Do I connect them separately directly on the motherboard? Is there anything else I should know? please be patient with me! any help would be appreciated many thanks in advance
Welcome to HWF Those ribbon cables are IDE cables, and are not used on hard disks anymore these days. SATA is now used. Now follow these steps to install your new hard disk: 1) Plug the small orange cable into the new hard disk. 2) There is a 4 wired cable (red, black, black, yellow) that is used to supply power to the drive. On that image I can see that the black plug of that cable is connected to a white extension cable. Pull out the extension cable, and connect the black plug (SATA power) to the connector left of the small orange SATA cable. Master and slave was used on the old IDE devices because multiple devices where connected to a single connector. But with SATA, every device needs to be connected to a different SATA connector, so you won't need to change any jumper settings.
hi just to let you know that I installed the Samsung HDD and then Windows XP yesterday and eveything worked fine. I will try to connect the old drive today and backup all the uncorrupted files. (Yes, the motherboard has 6 SATA ports) Since the red-marked cable in the photo above might be connected to a fan, I did not unplug it, I left it as it is just in case. many thanks for your help