how to slave a hard drive

[snuffy166]

I bought a new hard drive recently, how do I slave it to my existing one??

 

[edfair]

Jumper it as slave and plug it onto the primary channel cable. Also set the CMOS to the drive specs or use auto-detect to have BIOS to do it for you. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[dxd]

you should be careful to first determine what mode and channels your existing IDE devices are on.

If your current hard drive is jumpered for Cable Select and you want to put your new drive on the same channel, you should jumper the new drive for Cable Select and ensure the drive you want to be master is plugged in to the end connector on the cable...then plug the slave to the middle connector. If the current drive is jumpered for master, then yes, follow the instructions provided by Ed.

If you have an IDE CD drive in the mix, you may want to give some thought on which channel to attach it to..specially if it is a CDR/RW drive. If you have a burner, you would probably want to put it on the secondary channel and attach the two hard drives to the primary. If you don't have a burner...you may want to consider putting the hard drives on seperate channels (configured as master...using steps either for Drive Select or Cable Select as discussed earlier....this would probably give you better performance on drive to drive transfers as well as swap file usage if you will be running NT/2000/XP.

If you have both a CD & CDR/RW drive then you must really sit down and think about most transfers to the burner will be coming from...if you will be doing CD-CD copies, then you will probably want to seperate the CD drives on different channels. If you will be wanting to say dump a bunch of MP3's you downloaded to your hard drive(s), then I would seperate the burner from the hard drives.

Just food for thought. Doug
dxd_2000@yahoo.com

 

[avatar8481]

I have a related question, based on how to slave a hard drive. I have a large (75gb) IBM drive as my current master with Win2kpro installed. This drive seems to be dying or is having other issues, regardless, I want to make it not be my boot disk. If I add another hard drive to the IDE channel as a master, and rejumper this drive to slave then the master will boot first correct? Additionally, is there a prefered order that they should reside on the cable in, does the master have to be on the end of the cable, or can it be in the middle?

Thanks a lot, look forward to hearing your advice.

Michael

 

[Guest_imported]

Assuming no alteration to the BIOS booting order, and the disk is partitioned, formatted and has an op system on it, then the answer is YES. I assume you're planning to make a fresh installation of W2K PRO on this new drive, or maybe do a disk-to-disk copy, and ditch the existing drive.

Re the cable, I think it is usual for the Master to be placed at the end, but having said that, I've connected the Slave at the end and Master in the middle and never had any problems.

Going on from that, would anyone care to tell me what the maximum data cable length is for these ATA100 80-wire ribbons?

ROGER - GØAOZ.

 

[avatar8481]

Actually the "new" drive is my old laptop hard drive which has never had any problems, I bought a converter for it, so that I could plug it in on a standard IDE channel. It has win2k installed and has always worked well, I plan to make it my boot disk and see if I can't recover or replace my huge drive. Does anybody have any experience with doing this sort of procedure, or more generally trying to use laptop harddrives in desktops? Thanks.

Michael

 

[edfair]

No problem , they're interchangable in that direction. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Guest_imported]

Care needed when using the convertor, depending upon the type you've got. I've seen many which appear to have no keyway, so it's all too easy to poke the 5v/12v dc power supply onto the wrong pins!

Apart from that, it should work fine. I don't know if special brackets for mounting are available, but if not I suggest you cobble something simple together to stop the drive floating round inside the case!

ROGER - GØAOZ.

 

[edfair]

Buy the complete kit. Comes with rails to take it to 3.5. Think I paid about $10.00 each for the kits off the internet. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.