After my adventures with Microsoft the other week I decided to take up the advice of Oli & Chris and pop in a slave drive to my main machine. What a fscking nightmare - I am a complete technophobe when it comes to computer hardware. I couldn't even get the side of the case off, so resorted to a screwdriver and hammer - I managed to get the side off, but now it won't go back on. Ah well. Bummer.

So, installing a Slave Drive into a Dell is not at all straightforward. For starters they supply an IDE ribbon which is less than 6 inches long, and has no slave connector. Immediate expense buying a new ribbon (it was cheapo at £5 [$10] though), so not too bad. Advice from the computer shop;

Put the blue end in the motherboard, the grey connector is the slave and the black connector is the primary. Easy thinks I, I can do that. However they neglected to tell me that Hard Drives have little thingies which you have to swap about in order to get the computer to reckon the main drive as the primary, and the slave as the secondary.

After much gnashing of teeth, I sparked up the laptop to find a good resource site for computer idiots like me. OK, so I now have both drives correctly set up, and the jumpers (as I now now they are called) are both set to `ribbon select`. Should be good to go! I spark it up. A black screen with some error message about "slave not recognised". Gahhhh. I again swap about the jumpers to "master" on the master and "slave" on the slave. Spark it up - ahhhh, no error message this time…

I log in and double click "my computer" expecting to see an extra drive. Nothing showing. Gahhhh. So I swap the power connectors about just in case one of them is not working - again the computer sparks up without incident.

Back onto the Laptop - I find a site which states I have to format and partition the drive before Windows will recognise it. By this time, I know I'm getting close to completing the install After logging into the Computer Management screen, it's all plain sailing, and my new drive is now showing up and working fine.

Of course, now that I have done it once, I know what I have to should I want to do the same again. The next problem is that I need to purchase a HD bracket (they are made by Dell of course). As of now, the innards of the computer are all over my desk, the two drives are working as they should be and I am happy!

Damn you Microsoft. Damn you Dell.