Installing 2 hard drives question?

[ingeborgdot]

I would like to install two hard drives. One is a 200gb maxtor and the other a 160gb seagate. What would be the best way to do this? thanks.

 

[veggz]

I'm assuming they are both PATA drives? If so, set the faster one as your boot drive (the connector at the opposite end of the side connected to the MB) and the other as the slave (the connector in the middle). It's a pretty straightforward procedure.

 

[ingeborgdot]

One is pata and the other is sata.

 

[veggz]

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
One is pata and the other is sata.

In that case, hook up the SATA drive first (but do not connect the PATA drive), assuming you want to set the SATA as your master, which I recommend. After installing your OS hook up your PATA drive on the master IDE channel and set it as a slave in your OS.

 

[ingeborgdot]

It can't be that easy can it? Cool.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Pretty good advice, but any connector on the IDE cable can go to the Mother Board and any drive to any other connector. It is the Floppy cable that makes a difference. The A: drive must be on the connector with the twisted wires in the flat cable. Goes way back to the first PCs so the uninformed users didn't have to move a jumper on the drive to set which one was A or B or C or D. Jim

 

[Traire]

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
It can't be that easy can it? Cool.

For the Windows installation on the SATA drive, your going to need a floppy with your SATA drivers on it. Windows does not come with STAT drivers, so it wont recognize the drive without the floppy. When the windows installation first starts up, youll need to hit F6 and give point to the drivers on your floppy.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: veggz

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
One is pata and the other is sata.

In that case, hook up the SATA drive first (but do not connect the PATA drive), assuming you want to set the SATA as your master, which I recommend. After installing your OS hook up your PATA drive on the master IDE channel and set it as a slave in your OS.

why do you recommend this? if both drives are 7200rpm 8mb cache drives, the performance will be nearly equal. there would be nothing wrong with using the pata drive as the system drive and would save the installer some hastle with loading windows.

i personally recommend using the pata drive set as the master on ide0 with your first optical drive set as slave on ide0. after all is installed then you can just change the drive letters if needed so pata is C, sata is D and optical is E.

 

[blackinches]

Originally posted by: Traire

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
It can't be that easy can it? Cool.

For the Windows installation on the SATA drive, your going to need a floppy with your SATA drivers on it. Windows does not come with STAT drivers, so it wont recognize the drive without the floppy. When the windows installation first starts up, youll need to hit F6 and give point to the drivers on your floppy.

blackinches was wondering if ingeborgdot's motherboard has native sata, if so then you won't need the drivers on a floppy.

 

[Traire]

Mobos with that kind of support still seem to be few and far between. I havnt used any of the nf4 boards yet, and I have never owned an intel system let alone any of the newer ones, so it would be better to have a floppy ready just in case.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I am looking at getting the new asus a8v 939 motherboard I guess. So, yes it has native sata.

 

[ingeborgdot]

So how would you go about doing all this. My main concern is getting the os on one hard drive almost by itself so I can reinstall the os every so often when things begin to slow down a little. Does this sound feasible? What are my options?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: ingeborgdot
So how would you go about doing all this. My main concern is getting the os on one hard drive almost by itself so I can reinstall the os every so often when things begin to slow down a little. Does this sound feasible? What are my options?

install the os, get everything setup the way you want it and look into getting norton ghost, which can make an "image" of your system hdd and put it to anywhere you want. when things get bad, you could just put the image back on the system drive.