computer hard drive upgrade problems

I know this is a little off beat from the car audio but Im sure someone out there is multi skilled in audio and computers. Im trying to upgrade my computers hard drive to 500 gig and and make my current existing 250 hard drive a slave but it wont allow me to. If anyone has any info on proper procedure of doing this I would greatly appreciate it Thank you .

is the 250 gig the drive that your operating system is installed on?Nothing last's like the temporary.

yes the origional hard drive was the 250 and I bought a 500 gig and Im trying to install it as my master and make the 250 the slave. When I reboot it recognizes the 500 gig as the master and the 250 as the second master instead of slave and when it reboots, it reboots into the old drive instead of the new drive. I appreciate you replying.

Is there an operating system on the 500 gig drive?

Assuming IDE, because I haven't played with SATA yet. To be master/slave they must be on the same cable. I use the cable select jumpers on the drives themselves. If you have to have it organized a certain way, use the jumpers to define master and slave and put them in the right connector in the cable. Where it is on the buss doesn't seem to make much difference with XP/W2k and some linux (my FreeBSD and Suse installs didn't seem to care.) Once you have windows installed, the bootloader partition/drive will be marked Active unless it also contains the OS in which case Windows will call it the system drive/partition. I would highly recommend making multiple partitions. In fact the way I would set up what you have is, say 50gb on your 250gb as the OS partition (c:\) then either use the the remainder as a backup drive or cut a small piece of the 1/2tb drive as the backup location. If you have a drive failure, it's better to have your backup on a different physical drive. I like having the OS separate from the data partitions because all of the times I've reformatted (either as cleaning or because of software/virus) I have been able to keep my data and backup files on the computer while performing a clean install.