XP on master, 98 on slave

[F117NightHawk]

I got Win98 SE on my 30 GB UATA/100 drive. If I were to buy a 100 GB UATA/133 hard drive and make it the master and my current one the slave and then put XP on the master drive, how well would that work? Can a 100 and 133 drive be run on the same channel and is it OK to have a different OS on each one?

 

[InlineFive]

It is perfectly OK, ATA allows two different speed hard drives to operate at their speeds regardless of what else is on the channel. That's why you can put a hard drive (ATA133) and a CDROM drive (ATA33) on the same channel and have the hard drive work at it's rated speed.

And of course you can have two OS' on two hard drives, just make sure Windows XP is the primary and you use the Windows XP Boot Loader. Other than that you should be fine. Some people here triple-boot (rare though), ask! 🙂

-Por

 

[xenos500]

You probably arent using an ATA133 controller anyways, unless you got your maxtor retail and it came with the controller.

 

[PG]

I could be wrong, but I thought 98 wouldn't work on a slave drive, it had to be master.

 

[NogginBoink]

Originally posted by: PG
I could be wrong, but I thought 98 wouldn't work on a slave drive, it had to be master.

Correct.

The BIOS will find the first active partition on the first drive and load the boot code loader from that partition.

If you have WinXP on the slave drive, the bootcode loader (ntldr, ntdetect, boot.ini, etc) are all going to be on the primary drive, which meets the needs of the BIOS.

 

[F117NightHawk]

I decided that's too much trouble. I'm gonna do a fresh XP install and hope that works good. Now's just a matter of backing up all my files.