pcs generally have 1 or 2 ide channels

each channel can hold 2 devices, a master and a slave. you tell a device whether its a master or a slave by moving the position of a jumper on the pins at the back of the drive

im going to use the slot under my dvd drive.

so all im gonna do is plug in the power cable. ide cable.. andset the jumper into slave.

i dont know what exactly comes next..
all i know is that im going to turn the comp on and go to setup.

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q...l/IMG_6641.jpg

now, here it looks like this

take the usual antistatic and antielectrocution precautions then just screw in, attatch power and ide , make sure its set to slave.

when the pc boots up go into the bios (i think its f2 on dells, it should say) and see if the disk is detected. If it shows up then good, if not then you have a problem

When windows starts up (give it time to detect it) go control panel -> admin tools -> computer management -> disk management tab. This is where you can assign drive letters , partition and format things. If it shows up in my computer initally then you dont need to worry about this part

ok heres a bios picture.

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q...l/IMG_6644.jpg

so when i select either primary or secondary slave drive .. and put it into auto.. it says UNKNOWN DEVICE.

does that mean it detects it?

which one do i pick?

secondary or primary slave drive.

thanks for the help jbennet

never mind. i got it to work.

once again, thanks jbennet

yeah?, so it works now?

thats good

The optimum set up would be to have both hdds on the same IDE cable, the slower drive will dictate the speed of the devices set as master and slave.