pc question

my question to me being a pc user sounds elementary watson but i still cant get it done myself. okay how do i set up a second hard drive on my pc that can be dedicated to only making music i have a couple of old harddrives one ran windows 95 and the other windows 98 and my current pc runs xp can i use these old hd's and if so how do i go about setting them up (formatting and so on) can somebody help me out here thnx

just plug it in to the next connector on your exsisting IDE cable. make sure the second hard drive's jumpers are set for slave. format the drive using the drive utilities disk that came with your hd. boot to windows like normal (with the hard drive that's already there) and just save your audio files to that drive. maybe mess with the disk allocation (if any) in your audio program.

You have two IDE ports on a motherboard. Place this drive on the second port (i.e. not the one your main hard drive is on). Set the jumpers depending on wther or not you have any other device on this IDE port (such as a CDROM). I'd make the hard drive the master.

Boot up your PC and go to My Computer, right click on the new drive and select 'Format'.

Alternatively you may want to set up a dual boot with this new hard drive - this means you have a separate operating system on this drive where you only have music apps installed - XP lets you choose which OS you want to use at boot up. Do a search on Google for this as it's a little more involved.

good lookin out

should i move all of my music programs to the second hard drive or just save what i want to save to the hd.

I would keep my programs on the same drive as XP.
Before you go and open up all your old pc's, bear in mind that a HD dedicated to audio recording and streaming should be fast. You won't gain anything in peformance if you're going to use some old slow spinning hardisk made in '86. Do check how fast your new drive will be before you decide to use it. If the harddisk in your XP machine is twice as fast as the "new" drive, you're better of using one harddisk.
http://www.sesa.es/us/dskbench/dskbench.htm

so a slower secondary hd could slow down the overall performance of my pc my main hd has 60 gb is it even necessary to add a second hd. eventhough i already installed it and i know its way less than 60 gb its seagate from 97

A second HD won't slow down the overall performance of your computer, but it won't help if you're recording or playing back audio and your drive can't keep up. A second drive will cause your pc to start up a bit slower, but that's not the end of the world.
You can always try it, but if you've never installed new drives it might not be worth the efford if the drive itself is not fast enough.
I think a seagate drive from 97 can easily handle most audio tasks though, so you should be fine.
Go ahead and try it.

Personally, I would go out and buy a new hard drive - they're so cheap these days and a 7200rpm drive will do the job nicely.