dimension 3000 adding second hard drive

[rounded]

How do you add second hard drive on dell dimension 3000?

[corby]

Here's a video:

[Advisor]

What model number is in that video? I have a Dell Dimension 3000 (refurbished), and it doesn't look like that. It only has one HDD bay, and the drives are not SATA.

So to answer your question, you can't really reliably put in a second drive. If you need a bigger drive space, you can buy a drive cloning program and an external drive, backup your main drive to that, and buy a larger drive (NOTE: The drive must be EIDE, not SATA, unless you want to pay $35 for a converter). 500GB is probably the max you can find right now.

Where you plug the drive in is on the slave of the first HDD (don't forget to change the jumpers on the back of the drive!), and plug a power cable into it., and rest it on the bottom of the case (temporarily). Then, boot up using a rescue disk, or to the OS, and clone the external drive back onto the slave.

OR you can first clone the primary to the slave, and then plug in the slave as the primary, but this is slightly more risky. The previous way, you will also have a backup copy, which is good practice when doing this.

BTW, you may need to get into the BIOS to add the slave drive. I believe that is F12 or F2.

After you clone the main drive to the new, larger drive... detach the old drive from the system, and remove it from the drive bay, but keep it aside for backup, in case something goes wrong. Then, make sure the jumpers on the new drive are in Master position, and attach it to the empty drive bay. Don't forget to change the BIOS. Attach the EIDE cable and the power cord, close the case, and it should boot.

BTW, the 500GB drive I was talking about is the Western Digital Caviar Se Re. It's under $80 at many outlets online.

Good Luck!