Adding a second drive is pretty easy as long as you're comfortable with the internals of your computer (which it sounds like you are). Just set the jumpers on your 2MB drive to slave mode, plug it in to the IDE interface, and it should be recognized automatically. If not, go in to your bios and have it autodetect your drives. If the drive hasn't been used before, you may need to format it, but it should pretty much be working. If you're 8MB drive does crap out, you can just disconnect it and the 2MB one will be the 'primary' drive (even if it's in slave mode). Type a post back if you run in to any problems along the way...

Thanks, pOrk. That's pretty much what I figured...like it would recognize it automatically as if it were a zip, CD-R, or even a floppy drive. I expected that it would assign the next drive letter as well, but I don't see it in Windows Explorer.

The Device Manager shows both HDDs, with the master and new slave listed properly. The new slave shows that it is installed and operating properly, but it does not look formatted. It is enabled.

I'll have to figure out how to locate and format the new drive.

I appreciate the guidance.

Well, that wasn't too hard. Fortunately, I found some posts and located Opus' tweaks on the extended partition.

I initialized it, partitioned it, and formatted it through the Disc Manager snap-in.

Now I have a spare drive that I can save to. No mirroring or striping or RAID or anything. Just another hard drive to support the questionable one.

One less thing to worry about.

Now, I wonder: If my Local Disc(C) craps out, will I be able to create a partition on the new spare disc(E) and load the OS without losing the data on it? That would be great!