How-To Geek

While helping my neighbor get her PC up and running (the MB battery was dead) I discovered that it had 2 Hard Drives inside. One was a newer Seagate Barracuda 500GB and the other was the original Maxtor 200GB drive. One of the problems was the default bios settings were forcing the OS to boot from the old Maxtor HD which was so far out of date that it would not operate on the internet. I think it had IE4 as a browser. Anyway, to make a long story shorter, I now have it booting and running from the Seagate 500GB drive and everything seems to be working fine. Here is what we are working with: Prosessor AMD Athelon 64 X2 Dual Core 2.60 GHZ, 2048 Installed RAM memory, has 2 DVD drives, a floppy drive and a card reader. Operating System is Win XP Home. The system is approx 6 years old but it has been updated at some point in 2011(hence the 500GB Hard drive). I am wondering how the old Maxtor 200GB drive can be made useful in this system?? I'm not too smart so you might have to explain the procedure if any. Thanks for you help. /Mike

I would use it for periodic imaging. If you need detailed guidance, post back.

Periodic imaging? I have no idea what that is and my neighbor, who will soon get this PC back, is "technophobic". That's her word, not mine. Do you mean that the drive should be used to back up files etc from the main (C:) drive. Would I delete every thing from it first? Please give some more detailed guidance. Jeez, I might be technophobic too.

Imaging is the process of "taking a picture" of the contents of a hard drive and is a way to back up computers. The image that is taken can be used with a rescue disk to rebuild the contents of a hard drive. A rescue disk is a CD (or, in some cases, a USB stick) that is used to run your computer when the HDD can't and will use the image to rebuild the HDD. The link whs provided will explain things more thoroughly.

@ whs. Of course you can, if you think it will help people. One of my pet peeves when asking for tech help is the experts often do not realize that information that seems very simple and basic to them is not to novices and/or the "technology challenged." Most tech experts learned what they know because they have an ability to easily grasp the technology and they enjoy working with it. They usually enjoy helping others but often fail to understand that not everyone is blessed with their ability and enjoy working with it so they tend to leave out basic details that many, if not most, novices will not know. Most people use computers because they have to and they try to "fix" things themselves because running to a shop everytime something goes pear shaped is expensive.

Thanks, I will check out that tutorial and come back with questions (if any) later. Cheers!