I have an HP a1100y that I've been Frankenstein-ing for a while now with parts from a few other HP corpses. I put in a 230g drive, added a second DVD burner, 2gs RAM, BIOS updates, drivers and all that other stuff - it runs pretty quick now. I've been teaching myself all of this stuff over the last couple of months and am kind of a dinosaur, so please bear with me.

I want to slave another 120g drive from an HP 873n that was killed (I'm told) by a virus. I'm thinking that if I use the secondary IDE and scan it for bugs I might be safe. no?

This drive has some valuable data and I wouldn't mind the extra room (I have a ton of .AVI, MP4, etc.)

Am I making a big no-no ?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated .

Actually, that is the preferred way to kill malware and viruses, just make sure that the jumpers are correctly set on both drives.

Here's the thing:

My primary drive is wired with red ATA straight to the mobo.

My disc-drives are on the ribbon - master & slaved so that's all of that IDE.

BUT, there IS another IDE slot (got plenty of spare ribbon) AND there's another ATA slot on the mobo (just need the cable I guess).

What do ya think?

What you refer to as being connected by red cables and "ATA"...are SATA drives/connectors. Faster than IDE/PATA drives, but both can work in same system.

The other more familiar connectors are PATA/IDE.

Just so everyone understands what you are talking about .

As for your question, there should be no problem adding drives to either set of connectors. I have both types of drives employed on my other system and use a PCI controller card so that I can use more PATA drives. It all works.

Louis

Your computer only has one 40 pin ide connector and one floppy connector(32 pin).

You could temporarily remove one of the optical drives and connect the IDE hdd in its place until you get all the files.

Just make sure to tap the {ESC} key when you see the HP logo when you turn on the computer, this should bring up the bios boot menu. Use the arrow keys to select correct HDD to boot from.

Have you put a new motherboard in?

Is this the motherboard in your system? http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...product=1118244

Louis

Yes Louis, that's my MB - and thanks for setting me straight re; SATA.

It's been brought to my attention that I should upgrade my PSU, is this absolutely necessary - or just a good idea? 'Cause I'm poor, see?

Normally a higher rated power supply is needed when you add a video card to a PCIe or AGP slot on the mainboard. yours does not appear to have either of those slots, so I would say as long as the one you have works, Don't mess with it.