I recently received an 80gig hard drive from my friend's dead dell computer and decided to see if it still worked. I dissected an external USB 250gig hard drive, found a parallel ribbon cable and cannibalized an old power supply for a parallel power cable. I connected the mess together and after fiddling with the jumpers I managed to get my computer to recognize both drives. The main problem I've been experiencing is that my computer will now only recognize 32GB of the 80 in the hard drive (I do not have the jumpers set to limit capacity to 32GB). And it will only recognize both drives when I do have the jumpers set to limit capacity to 32GB on cable select. I do not know what kind of controller is running the interface nor is it written anywhere on the device.
Is what I am doing completely ludicrous or is this possible?
My technical skills are amateur at best so layman's terms would be appreciated.
Thanks.
p.s. sorry if this is a little tl;dr