I just bought a new HP, I was going to add a second hard drive just for music, etc. but, when I went to wire it to the motherboard the ribbon wire would fit into the drive but not the motherboard. I noticed the original hard drive in the comp didn't use ribbon wire and where it connected to the board there were 3 empty ports. Do they make a ribbon wire that has 2 different size on one wire? Or a wire that wil connect to the hard drive then to that newer style port that I described? Thanks in advance!

I recently added a new hard drive to my laptop, so I'm not sure if this is the route you want to take. I went to Fry's and bought an external case for the hard drive and it uses a usb cable.

Welcome to progress

It sounds like your new computer comes with Serial ATA connections/drives

It sounds like you bought a drive with the older standard, Parallel ATA standard.

You can either take the drive back and swap it for a SATA, buy a parallel ATA controller card and hook it into that, or as X_Trippin' pointed out, convert it into an external USB drive. That would be my least desirable choice since you would take quite a performance hit.

Easiest would be to get an IDE controller. They can readily be had for around $20 .

You da man!
Progress? I call that a pain in the ass! I already have a 300 and a 80 GB 'homemade external' but, Itunes is being picky as usual. So I decided to just to install one of the extra drives I have. I'll just look into a SATA drive
Thanks, Doc!